Wednesday November 26, 2014 at 10:05am
Here at Solid Solutions we love little quirks that save us time so I will run down some of the few that time after time leave our customers asking ‘how did you do that?’
Here at Solid Solutions we love little quirks that save us
time so I will run down some of the few that time after time leave our
customers asking ‘how did you do that?'
1. Scrolling through open documents
Everyone
has been there, it’s 3 o'clock you haven’t closed anything down since you
started working and you can’t remember which of the 14 similarly named open files is which.
Fortunately
using CTRL+ TAB you can scroll in between all of your open documents,
conveniently providing you with a screenshot so you can see which model you’re
about to open as well as an icon highlighting whether it is a part, assembly or
drawing.
2. Creating your own keyboard shortcuts
SOLIDWORKS provides a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts by
default, if you are unsure as to what they are you can right mouse button click
on your command manager and scroll to the bottom of the long list and click
customise.
Once in this menu if you click on the Keyboard shortcuts tab
you can see all of the commands that have shortcuts attached to them and print
off a list.
A good idea is to assign shortcuts to tools you use
frequently saving time scrolling through menus, personally I like to assign
shortcuts to dimension and mate tools.
To add these shortcuts just find the command in the drop down list then in the box next to it click the keys you want to assign and presto
your shortcut has been created!
View Blog on Customising SOLIDWORKS Toolbars
3. Command Search Bar
One of the great things about
SOLIDWORKS are the vast amount of things you can do with the software,
unfortunately this means remembering where everything is.
As we are no elephants we may
often forget where commands are, this is a common call to the support desk when
nine times out of ten the customer knows exactly the name of the command that
they are looking for!
Fortunately there is a tool to
resolve this - the command search bar!
4. Opening parts and assemblies directly from bills
of materials
Once you've got to the end of creating your drawing and you
realise that a few components have properties missing or you can’t work out
what that component is, instead of finding it through your folders a little
known tip is that using your right mouse button you can open it directly from
the BOM.
Here are some more ways Russell
has found to open files from drawings.
Chris Morrogh
Applications Engineer