Add it in!

We're all familiar with SolidWorks Add-Ins such as COSMOSWorks, PhotoWorks, or Third Party items such as DriveWorks. But did you know that some productivity softwares, such as MS Excel also utilize add-ins? It's true. Furthermore, you might realize that you are already using one! If you don't know, allow me to show you- in MS Office 2007- where to go. So, start up Excel... go ahead...

At the bottom corner of the Start menu for Excel, you'll note the Options button.

Note the "Add-Ins" category. By selecting this you can see what add-ins are available and which are active or not. Some add-ins are loaded when you install some other piece of software. Others are additional content for and through Microsoft Excel that need to be downloaded before using. (You can select the images to make them larger)

Here to the left, I clicked "Go" from the previous screen and you can see I've chosen one of the add-ins provided to us by Microsoft. This particular add-in allows me to perform histograms, covariance analysis, and random number generation among others.

So what?  What could this possibly have to do with SolidWorks. Well, quite a bit if you frequently work with Design Tables or use third-party SolidWorks add-ins such as DriveWorks. Both of these examples heavily rely on Excel. For example, if we used a design table to capture important dimensions of a part and the MROUND command to round up the values for displaying within the part drawing, we would be concerned if whether the Excel Add-In that contains that function was installed lest the design tables fail to round the values accordingly.

This problem, like others with Excel, can often be abrogated by simply insuring that you are using the most recent version of the tool. This however isn't always available as an option. So, as a friendly reminder from another SolidWorks user who has been bitten in the backside by Excel, please be sure to check your add-ins. (especially if your company is upgrading from one version to another) And who knows? You might find that useful command you were looking for that you never thought Excel could do!

If you are a DriveWorks user then setting up Excel shouldn't be something new. Along with Add-Ins, you also have macro and security settings to consider. But this, as the expression goes, is "another episode."

Comments

[Jeff Cope]

Great post. Probably the most powerful Excel Add-in that is also the most overlooked and potentially the most useful for SolidWorks purposes is Excel Solver. Solver does multivariable optimization and was added to Excel mainly to do very heavy-duty financial calculations. However, it is extremely well-suited to optimizing things in SolidWorks as well.

Thanks again for the great post.

Jeff Cope