iTunes® has changed the way media lovers store, organize, and maintain their multimedia files. Comparing iTunes® to SolidWorks ePDM for file management, we can draw many similarities between the two management applications.
During this complimentary, one-hour webinar, discover why storing design files on your operating system just doesn't make sense and the benefits of having complete control over your design information!
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When creating an edge flange, sometimes you might want the new flange to be perpendicular or parallel to a specific face or plane.
This is very beneficial if you have created lofted bends as your sheet metal part.
When you create your new edge flange feature, there is an option to select a face to make the newly created flange perpendicular or parallel to.
This must be a face, you cannot select a plane at this time. However, you can extrude a surface that resides on a plane (as another feature before creating your new flange) and use that as a selectable face. That is the blue face that is in the picture above.
Once the face is selected, you can tell SolidWorks to make the new flange perpendicular or parallel to that face.
This is much easier than trying to figure out what angle will make the new flange parallel with one of your primary planes.
Every once in a while you may find yourself in a situation where you need access to modify certain files pronto and someone else has them checked out. To make matters worse they’re unavailable (offsite) or even out of the country! Here we’ll show you how to overcome that. Let’s say you’re a user, say "Bob White" in the Training Vault who needs access to all the documents of the Hand Truck: "Axle.sldprt", "Brace.sldprt", and a few others. Your boss tells you to take over the design because the deadline got pushed up and you log in to start working on them – which is when you find out that they are still checked out to Bob!
What’s more, if you check the presence note by hovering your mouse over Bob’s name,
and clicking on the presence note (
), you find he’s on vacation and won’t be back for nearly a week!
How do you get in to modify those files now???
The answer? Admin: Undo Checkout!
Contact your admin who can log into the vault as the "EPDM Administrator" aka "Admin" and perform an undo check out. Now if you can login as Bob then you could undo checkout the files yourself, but chances are you can’t reach him if you’re still anxiously reading this. Only the Admin can undo checkout someone else’s files. Once logged in as Admin:
you can browse to the files, highlight them all and and from the right click menu pick "undo checkout".
Make sure to click the "Undo check out" boxes or nothing will happen.
You’ll get a message for each file asking you if you are sure, simply say yes to each one and you’re done!
Navigating a large feature tree can be a bigger challenge when you have to navigate it while in the PropertyManager for a feature. You can imagine a scenario where you have to add multiple mates to a single datum plane that is buried deep in your feature tree, and you have to keep digging through the feature tree to find it. Look at the screen shot to the right, and try to picture yourself digging around for a reference that's embedded in two levels of sub-assemblies.
There is a feature, new to SolidWorks 2013, that is an easy solution to help you find these items easier called the Favorites Folder. This keeps your favorite features and components in a handy folder at the very top of your Feature Tree, which makes them easy to find and reference later on.
One of my favorite things about this is how easy it is to find and use. You can add any sketch, feature or reference geometry to the folder simply by selecting it in your feature tree with your Right Mouse Button and selecting "Add to Favorites". This will allow you to readily access your favorite references at the top of your feature tree.
By default, the Favorites Folder is set to show automatically when necessary, just like the Solid Bodies and Surface Bodies folder. Also, like the Solid and Surface Bodies folders, you can control its visibility through the Hide/Show Tree Items option in your system settings. Once you have the feature added to your Favorites Folder, it's easy to find atop your Feature Tree instead of having to scroll through. This also makes it easy to access when you want to edit the feature.
Every once in a while in this space, I like to depart from the usual technical tips and tricks and think back to not the tool but the reasons for its use. We need to learn the tools of our trade, certainly, but we must also continually learn and refine our craft. We are, after all, designers. SolidWorks is the mechanism by which we translate our ideas into reality. As designers, we are taught to think outside the box. To look at the world a little differently. To see solutions where there were none before. Speaking for myself, I know I have sought and received inspiration from the work of others…perhaps you recall my article in these very pages on a longtime favorite of mine, Brooks Stevens.
Aside from others’ designs, I also enjoy reading their thoughts and perspectives on Design Thinking itself. This month, I thought I would leave you with a couple simply elegant quotations from those I respect and admire:
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in the room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city.”
--- Eliel Saarinen
“It’s art if it can’t be explained. It’s fashion if no one asks for an explanation. It’s design if it doesn’t need explanation.”
Who are your biggest inspirations, in your work?
If you're a CAD Admin and have network SolidWorks licenses at your company then this is for you. You may have noticed when working with the SolidNetWork License Manager that there is a tab called "License Order". Most people don't pay much attention to this because it doesn't come into play unless you have SolidWorks Simulation licenses. The reason is, all other features in SolidWorks are their own add ins so the license manager determines what package of SolidWorks (standard, pro, or premium) is used based on what addins are turned on. Simulation, however, is just one addin but there are three different versions of SolidWorks simulation; SolidWorks Simulation, Simulation Professional, and Simulation Premium. The "License Order" tab is how SolidWorks determines what version of simulation is pulled when a user turns on the "Simulation" addin in SolidWorks. So for example say your company owns a SolidWorks Premium ( which includes the basic Simulation package), Simulation Professional, and Simulation Premium network licenses. If you go under the License Order tab in the license manager you'll see these three licenses listed. The order from top to bottom is the order that SolidWorks will pull each of the licenses when the Simulation Addin is turned on within SolidWorks. So if the licenses were listed with Simulation Professional First, then the first person to turn on the Simulation addin would get the pro license and so on and so forth.
Now say you have a particular user that always uses Simulation Premium and you want that user to always pull the Simulation Premium license. Well, you may or may not know that there is also a client version of the SolidNetWork license manager on each of the user's machines. You can find that by going to Start, All Programs, SolidWorks <version>, SolidWorks Tools, SolidNetWork License Manger. On this individual user's machine, you could set Simulation Premium to be the first license in the list and then whenever that user tries to pull a Simulation license it first tries to get a premium license instead of trying to get the professional license based on the license order set on the server license manager. The best way to think of it may be like a global variable versus a local variable. The ordering on the server applies to all users unless the ordering on their individual machine is changed; then at that point the user machine takes priority.
Hopefully for those of you that have multiple simulation network licenses, this gives you some direction on how to best manage those licenses.
