Lunch & Learn - Designing Templates from Scratch

so what when I came up with this topic you know like I could have made it much broader but I wanted to to kind of focus the conversation in on how do I start my templates over if I were to scrap what we have now not completely but start fresh to make sure everything is exactly how I need it to get the standardization completed with all the links and all the bells and whistles that SolidWorks offers related to templates and I said well really have to show that from scratch so that's what we're going to kind of talk about today this presentation once it's complete today can be used as a guide going forward for your step-by-step process for creating templates so that's how I'm presenting this so we're going to talk about where to start with templates again give you multiple options with with here today we're talking about creating from scratch I'm going to give you that step-by-step process and then to show you the entire thing we're going to talk about the property tab builder and how that might associate with this as well so just to start with the end goal today here's the title block and border that I'm going to create for you in bits and pieces but I want to show you what this is going to look and feel like live so first thing we would do is I would create a new part let's say and if I launched a new part and doesn't really matter what I use here the first thing in a perfect world that we would do is we would use our property tab builder to fill out some information like the project the drawing number you know description okay and then you get things like wait that come when you create an actual solid piece to it you'll see that you actually get some weight component to it and obviously my units are messed up this is not 254 pounds but using the property tab builder drives the information into the custom properties now my conversation today is going to get away from using the custom properties section of the parts and assemblies okay so once we have this what I'm able to do is create a new drawing using the same method and here's my finished template that I just talked about and that finished template also has its own custom properties now I want you to notice as I do this I'm going to kind of zoom in on the title block my property tab builder allows me this is how this template set up I have a watermark I can do drawn by and drawn date information check by and check date and then approve by an approved date notice these properties are different than what we saw in the part file we're going to have that conversation and as soon as I apply them they show up in my title block the watermark that I described also shows up across the middle of the drawing and now I can go ahead and layout and create a a model view here of the part that I created making sure I save it and once I create and place that model view you'll notice the rest of the properties automate into the title block so this is the goal is to go through this process so that you can use the the property tab builder as your interface for filling out the title block take advantage of things like watermarks and not have to edit your title block manually but how do we start this from scratch again our conversation today so we don't have to start from scratch we have really three main choices that we can use inside of SolidWorks as far as where to start I can take the SolidWorks templates and I could go ahead and start to perform some modifications on them which probably a lot of you have done I could import my templates using a DWG format making sure that I've followed the rules as far as importing to the sheet format I see a lot of problems with that or as we're talking about today we're going to start from scratch now starting from scratch allows me to set up a process that we can follow every time so if I want a new template here's what I need to do for that template and we're going to go all the way on down through to creating a property tab builder tab to go along with your templates so here are the steps that we need to perform first thing we need to do is we need to really sit down and understand through all your sizes of drawings that you're going to create what are the properties that you do need for your title block kind of get that organized we're going to go ahead and create the border from scratch and talk about some of the tools we're going to use for that we need to give us the ability to do the linking so we have to do some other steps along the way one is to create properties in parts and drawings and I'll show you that process we're going to place a view on the drawing which will allow us to add the parametric notes we're going to add any blocks and logos that we need we're going to make sure we set all our options and we're going to have a little more discussion about sheet format versus template so starting at the beginning outlining your properties for your title block now this conversation is a little bit different depending on which organization you belong to but here's how I'd like to think about this when I start apart or assembly inside of SolidWorks what type of information do you know right off the bat to describe that part or assembly things like description part number material finish now if that information is to be utilized in the title block we want to kind of organize our thoughts in some sort of table so that we know which properties are going to be stored in the part file and which properties are going to be stored with the drawing now when you create the part you don't know anything about the approver and the checker and watermarking that's associated specifically to the drawing so here's how I've organized my properties for the template that we're going to create today in the part we're going to give some project information like you saw in the property tab builder we're going to specify our revisions put a description for the part we're going to capture the weight and we're going to put in a drawing number now for the drawing we want to capture the drawn by approved by checked by in our watermarks as you saw so this table gives us a nice little format going forward that we're going to utilize you know the next step in the process is to create the border itself now this is probably going to be the bulk of your time creating and working with this border now in order to understand the border in SolidWorks we have to have this conversation and for some reason over time this has always been a very confusing part of solvers sheet format versus the sheet now when I say border what I'm really doing is I'm creating the title block border that is part of the sheet format another part of that sheet format is all the notes that we're going to be doing the linking so think of that as a layer that's going to be slapped on top of the other part which your sheet which is your paper size definition your options any tables those two things go together so let's keep that in mind as we kind of move forward in the conversation today sheet format versus the sheet now creating the border because it's part of the sheet format we got to make sure we create it on the sheet format now we're going to use all sorts of tools inside of SolidWorks to create the border everything from sketching to patterning to some of the grid tools the line format toolbar for line color line thickness maybe some of you are not aware this the ability to hide and show annotations and how that works and how do we actually get in to the sheet format so how do we get started let's go ahead and dismiss this one for a second and the first thing we want to do is if you're starting from scratch is to go ahead and grab one of SolidWorks templates now does it matter which cheap format and size just make sure you pick the same size that you're creating in this case of B size landscape and you'll notice SolidWorks puts its own format on there and we're used to this now the first thing we want to do is to go in and delete everything off that format in order to get to the format we have to right-click in the template and select edit sheet format which brings me back into that layer that layer we talked about that's sitting on top of the paper I now have access to everything on it and in this case because we're starting from scratch I'm going to go ahead and delete it well now we want to create our own border that looks like the one that we presented initially so we're going to get into sketching we're going to use standard tools to be able to start to draw my border now the issue with starting to sketch out your border is we really need some more precise positioning of items there's some standards as to the the spacing of the title block to the edge of the paper and so on well I can't put a dimension between a sketch line in the edge of the paper so here's where our grid is going to come into play we're going to go ahead and if you right-click in the sheet format you can physically display the grid now other than being blocks that I can line up to I really need to understand you know what the distances are let's say I needed a one inch border around the outside of this thing now the best way to do that is to go into your tools options under document properties and grid and snap this is where we specify the grid spacing the major lines and the number of minors per major so I'm going to just change this to eight here now what that allows me to do now that I go into the spacing of the corner is I can now move this the corner of this rectangle exactly where I need it to be okay and this gives me in this case a half inch spacing all the way around I'm going to have to go to each corner to do this just to make sure I got everything exactly the way I want and I tend to zoom way in on this as well and I apologize on the webinar just so you can get right on those lines with very little deviation okay and you're going to go ahead and do this on all four corners now the next thing we need to do is is draw the portions of the title block obviously standard sketching a couple of things that I try to focus on when I do this is don't try to create multiple line segments if there's a line running all the way across make sure you follow kind of our standard sketching rules and sketch it as a a single item also anytime you could take advantage of patterning and I'm going to show you here as we create this taking advantage of patterning in your title box is just as important as patterning inside of SolidWorks sketching it's a little bit different to use if you haven't used it under tool sketch tools you can actually perform a linear pattern now instead of specifying Direction using a selection like we've done in the past what you actually use is an angle so if I want to copy that line 90 degrees you can see 90 degrees is completely vertical so for me to copy it down I would use in this case 270 degrees I can specify my spacing between them and the number of times I want to repeat the line and that way it gives me the proper spacing now I'm going to do some trimming a little bit later but another thing to be careful of is to watch out for your relationships because you want to create a title block that's going to be easy to work with later so you know picking up things like here the the center point of that line you may want to avoid doing that unless you knew for sure that was always going to be the center point at some point you can go ahead and come in here and do a little bit of trimming in this case we're going to remove several areas that we we know are not going to be utilized now here's the benefits of having the patterning now I can go ahead and adjust the the lines in the spacing in my border updates as expected it just it's going to help you going forward when your boss comes to you and says hey can you just tweak this title block and we need to put this information in there it becomes important to be able to do that now you'll notice that there's a dimension for my pattern in my title block well there's no problem using dimensions to start to position in space geometry now sometimes you may or may not want to keep your grid on so you can go ahead at any point in time and turn that off and we can go ahead and start to actually specify distances that we want the spacing of the lines to actually be let's say we're going to use a half inch there and we want three quarter inch spacing here and make sure these are the same we're going to go ahead and put 3/4 here now this is may seem like a tedious process but what this is going to allow you to do is to adjust them a lot easier later on because once you get into fonts and font sizes and how that's going to look you're really going to want some control over what's there you may want to you know get to the point of getting the overalls you know total heights you know things like that get everything in here that you might need so that you can adjust it further now some other tools that you're going to to get into here you'll notice that my sketch lines are blue there's a toolbar called line format and on that line format toolbar is the ability to change the line color now you typically aren't going to want your border to be blue so what I would do is I would select everything go to my line color and give it the color black now another option for those of you familiar with it would be to use layers I tend not to use layers it just seems like an extra step that's not needed but changing the color is important the other thing that you may want to adjust is the line style and thickness there's another tool also online format for that where I can go ahead and adjust the thickness of my border and you'll see here when i zoom in that's much thicker than I had before and it's really up to you how you want to adjust that I'm just going to keep mine mine thin and utilize it that way so this is the tedious part you draw your title block we can always add stuff to it when I'm done with it I'm going to go ahead and go back to the paper where we add the views using a command called edit sheet okay and that brings us back to it now instead of having you sit here and watch me draw a title block uh I've actually completed this a little further now there's one more item I want to add to this when you have a multi sheet drawing the second sheet of the drawing typically doesn't have the same title block as the first so what I would also recommend is to go ahead and add a sheet do the same thing on this sheet which is going to edit the sheet format and draw in the title block that you want on sheet 2 sheet 2 may only have a couple of the fields in the title block now what you end up with is something that looks like this where you have sheet 2 with a few of the items on here sheet one has your entire title block all designed out with all your dimensions now you obviously can't create a template that has a bunch of dimensions on there so we need a way of getting rid of them temporarily I need them because I want them to utilize them for changes later well each dimension if you right-click on it you're going to have the ability to hide those dimensions now that's fine we know that we can do that the problem usually resides when someone says I don't know how to get them back so if I come in here and hide all the dimensions in this case let's go ahead and hide that all right now how do I get Mack well under the view menu is a tool called hide show annotations and this can be used for hiding and showing not just dimensions but also notes which is our next conversation but if I use hide show annotations what it's going to do is show any grayed out or hidden annotations if I want to show it I just click on it and now become shown if I want to hide it I just click on it again so it's like a toggle so it's a tool that stays on when I'm done hiding or showing I just turn the tool off and it gives me everything I need okay so we have our borders I have my border from my second sheet we can go ahead and hide those dimensions as well so that we don't have anything showing now the next step in the process probably just as tedious as your title block and that's organizing and putting the notes in the system here so we have to put the notes that describe each of the fields and then we have to create the notes that are related to those fields so let's just jump back to my powerpoint just for a moment before we do that process this next step is very very critical this I think is the one piece that people miss out on when creating their own templates and this is how I put it you if you know the properties like we outlined in step one if we know what we need to link to we next need to create parts and our drawing that actually has those properties ok so let's show that for a second you want to follow your outline and you want to populate the field with information that's common to that field and I'll explain that as we go ahead and perform this so the first thing I want to do is I want to create a new part and this time we don't have the property tab because we're just designing our templates I know which properties that we're going to pull from the part so I'm going to go ahead and create those manually so going into file properties inside of Solomons allows me to type in property names and values for those properties now one thing I've been trying to preach is don't get caught up in this list this list is just a text file that's contained inside a SolidWorks and if you go through this process you are going to need to even worry about this list because you won't ever need it so in this particular case we need to fill out our properties that we're going to use and then as I mentioned in my notes is to fill it out with common text so maybe you know that your project is you know 20 character long characters long so type in 20 characters this is a block so we would need project we need description we need I'm just going to put in we're going to put in drawing number and we're going to go ahead and put in weight now weight is a little bit different because we aren't going to type in the weight each time we actually want to gather up the mass from solid works so under the value and expression we can actually tie to information from SolidWorks most you know this and I could tie to the mass of the part here now I also want to create some geometry and I just have a little macro that creates a block now this I call the the dummy part is going to be used to help us do our linking so let's just save that right to my desktop and we're going to utilize that in just a moment now back to my template what I want to do here is is very similar I want to go to the file properties of the drawing and I want to fill out all the information that I need that I'm going to link from the drawing like drawn by drawn date checker check day watermark all the things that we mentioned previously okay now we do this all because we need something to link to and unless those properties exist we won't be able to do our linking so how does our our linking occur well some of our notes in the title block are what we call parametric and some of them are static text for instance a project field has a title here title project and then an actual linked note so if we start to lay that out we'll use our annotation tool we'll go ahead and place an annotation in here and this is just static text so we're going to just type in project okay now our fonts you want to pay attention at this point to the font that you're using standardizing on your fonts and also pay close attention to your alignment because once these fill out if they're Center aligned they're going to you know grow a different way as you start to populate them now there's nothing wrong with copying a note you can see that it still gives me the note here I can go ahead and drop the note in the bottom here in this particular case we're going to change this portion to century gothic 14 we want it to be Center aligned in this case so we can move the note to this the center of the box here but we're also going to link it now this is where you want to pay attention what you're doing highlight the box and off the left of the property manager is a link to property option now here's where our conversation about where does the property reside comes into play are we linking to a property that exists in the drawing so we're going to use current document or we linking to a property that comes from a part now the terminology is a little bit confusing because the option to get it from the part is model in view specified in sheet properties so what exactly does that mean the model specified and view properties well I'm just going to exit out of there for a moment if I go to my sheet 1 right we're designing here and I go to the properties there's a little option at the bottom to use custom property values from the model shown in well the reason this is here is let's say you have five views on a drawing in one of those views of a different part or a different Assembly when it uses custom properties you can tell it what your view contains the parts that you're going to utilize otherwise it takes the very first part that's placed in here now back to my note for a moment when I go link to property and I specify model in view you'll notice that it doesn't have project and that's a problem and the reason is because there is no model on the drawing so here's what I always do let's go ahead back to my sheet and I'm going to go ahead and just create a view of that model that we just created that's just a dummy view and the reason we do that is now when I go into my edit sheet format and I do my link to property there's a model that we can link to now obviously that is going to be there when we actually get to our template but now I can go ahead and link to my project okay and I can go ahead and place that in there now I can utilize and position this exactly where I want it so that my project information shows up where I need now there's a couple other notes on this drawing that I think are worth showing at the bottom we want to show sheet 1 of 1 sheet 1 of 2 depending on how many sheets we have and if we go ahead and add that note in here I can type in some of this information but I need it to always change it needs to go from sheet 1 of how many tisha to to of how many well in the link to property is also another set of properties there SolidWorks special properties you may be aware that these are all throughout SolidWorks but there's a couple of them in here in here you can link to the current sheet and the other one will be the total sheets so what I'm going to do is link to the current sheet sheet one of and then do a second link in the same note for the total number of sheets so this will constantly update so that it has the properties that we need now the same thing goes down here for for weight we're just linking to the SolidWorks special property that's already created let's see if there's any other ones that I want to focus on I think that would be good another one would be scale so if I drop the scale in here and I want to link the property that's also in here under sheet scale ok so we can have something dynamic in the sheet itself okay so using this process things you want to consider definitely copy and paste so if you've already set your font on some of the titles go ahead and copy and paste and very easily be able to get the next title in there without having to modify and format everything laying out what you want linked in what's unlinked and the end result of this is a border that has everything you need in it now this has all the linked items in it and I'm actually not in the sheet format but if I edit the sheet format you'll notice what happens here I now have and some of you may be seeing this these big long notes that describe what I'm linked to these are the parametric notes now they're obviously longer than the fields that they are they're used to create well there's a couple things to think about with this under our view menu are a couple things there's an option called annotation link errors now anytime you have a link on your title block that the software cannot find the property from the part it creates an error now if I turn that option on you can actually see that there are fields here but they're errored out because it's not finding that information okay I tend to turn those off but it's a great way of just checking to see if there are notes that have been linked the other one is this annotation link variables with this on that's where you're supposed to be able to see these link variables these names these drawn-out note descriptions that tell you where it's getting the information okay now if I were to mouse over one of the notes in this case the drawn date notice the label for this one is different than the label for description because in description we're actually pulling that property from the part and the drawn date we're pulling it from this particular drawing so when you see dollar sign PRP and then a property you know that that's a property coming from the drawing if you see PRP sheet that's a property coming from the file specified in here okay dollar fine PRP sheet okay so this process is is very tedious but you can review what you've done using these annotation link variables and annotation link errors okay now notice they disappear once you're exit the title block I believe this is where this comes into play why mine is it but I think it should show up even on the border when you're exiting it showing what you're actually linked to so we've got our title block we've got our links what do we do with the actual parts that we've used to create the title block now I'm back here because we have a dummy file attached to this thing I can't save it as a template here well once you create the links like we did with this project name you can go ahead and delete the view off the drawing you only needed it there to create the link and notice that the project information disappears now the next thing that you want to do is go to the actual template itself and remove all the custom properties we don't need this information in the template itself it'll get filled out later okay so back to our previous conversation when we filled out those properties it's only a temporary thing to make sure that we can create the links once we have the links you can go ahead and get rid of it that brings us to this stage we have a title block that's missing logos and it's also missing some other text that is considered standard in our organization so let's just bounce back to my slide for a moment we've placed the view on the drawing okay we've added parametric notes talked about alignment font and font sizes special properties I will mention symbols here in just a moment and then adding blocks and logos here are the three that I need to add I need to add a block for my first versus third angle projection this is a template that's going to use third angle projection I got to put our proprietary and confidential note on there and now I want to put a company logo now the best way to approach this is to save out blocks now if you haven't done this in SolidWorks before I can show you real quick and just just pick a template here if there's something that you want to be a block okay edit your sheet format this happens to be a note you go to tools block make okay so you're adding two notes to a block okay then if you right-click on that new block you can actually save it and I'll just save my now I have a folder where I've put a few blah box in there that we're going to utilize now now that I have this I can go ahead and drop this in to my new drawing again I'm going to go to the sheet format because I want all these notes to be on the title block in the border which we're going to utilize okay so let's go ahead to insert the block you go to tools block insert okay in this case I have a proprietary block that's going to be in this section down here now another thing is notice how this is snapping it gets very annoying when you get a lot of stuff in here and it starts to snap well if you hold down your control key you can go ahead and place that without snapping to other things okay but by default it's going to try to align on all sides now the next thing I didn't need to do is insert the logo now hopefully before you created your border you've got an understanding of how big your logo is in inch inches or millimeters depending on your template but once you do have that you go to your chin tool sketch tools sketch picture and you browse for a picture that you're going to use as your company logo and it will go ahead and place it on the drawing now you can lock the aspect ratio which allows you to do some scaling but you wanted to make sure that it's going to fit in your title block here's another reason why you want some adjustability to your title block to be able to make things fit just just right so we'll go ahead and place that into our title block and now I have only one more piece in here I need to insert my first versus third angle projection note which outlines what I'm actually using for projection now for those of you unfamiliar with first versus third angle projection I did put a little blurb on this here let's get back in there so third angle projection is is common in the states european standards will use first-angle projection it just has to do with how the views are folded off of the front view and how they're represented but the symbol on the title block differs depending on the projection type that we're using if we go back to SolidWorks for a moment I've placed the third angle projection but I want to make sure that I set up a little bit later everything so that my template is actually set to utilize third angle projection as well so now I have everything I need in my title block for that one other thing we want to place kind of in the background here is my watermark now I didn't do that with the linking so I'm going to kind of go back to our concepts before let's go ahead and go to my file properties of the drawing and I need to create a note called watermark so I can link up a note in the sheet format okay no actually is one on here now if I edit the sheet format this is no different than any other note it's a note that's linked to a property called watermark and with that note you have the ability to use your sketch tools to rotate it so I rotated it but there's one other piece that makes it very nice to have on your drawing if you right-click on a node this is I believe added in 2013 you have the option with these notes to display them behind the text now when you display them behind the text you can add views onto the drawing and it doesn't obstruct those it will sit in the background of that as well okay once you have that link created again you can go ahead and delete the property and that way you don't have any pre-existing information into it now another part of this that we want to talk about is sheet 2 we use sheet 2 as far as a setup exactly like we do sheet 1 but we want to make sure that every time I add a sheet that it uses the sheet format for sheet 2 from here on out now how do we make that happen when you're setting up your template and you add a second sheet what you want to do is go to the properties and make sure in your template that this is pointing to your sheet format for sheet 2 now this is where the conversation gets very tricky sheet formats are borders we all agree on that we talked about that at the beginning so my goal with this was to create two borders that make up one template they're both existing within a template well I might want to use these borders on other old drawings where I want to swap out the borders so what we do is we save out the sheet formats so I actually have a sheet to format somewhere and I'm going to show you how to actually save those out so what I do in my template is I make sure it's pointing to the sheet 2 sheet format now the neat thing about a template is never reloads the sheet format unless it's prompted for the dialogue to do so you'll notice when I go ahead and add a sheet it didn't ask me what she format it new and there's one very particular reason for this in the template that I'm creating if I go to my tools options and I'm just going to do a quick search on format there's an option in here under system options and you're going to want to make sure this is set on anybody that that's using your templates as a standard it's show sheet format dialog on add new sheet if this is on it will bring up the dialog if it brings up the dialog you're going to be able to pick any sheet format but if it doesn't bring up the dialog it will automatically use the last one specified which in my case happens to be sheet 2 okay so you can make this happen automatically now also another gotcha with this option if this option is on let's say you send your template to somebody else if this option is on it will prompt you for the sheet format and if you don't have the sheet format it will blank out your template you'll have issues now hopefully we're all on board when I'm talking about sheet format we're talking about my title block and border okay so what's the next step next step in the process is to set the options on our template we now need to make sure everything is exactly where I need it as far as the document properties for my template am I using ANSI vs. iso standard what are the units okay the option show sheet format dialog which is a system option something called anchors I'm going to show you that adding your tables if you have a rev table here's where you go ahead and put that on the drawing as well and I'm going to show you where the first vs. third angle projection is so back to this go to your tools options from here go to document properties anything you set in here get stored with the template okay so if it's ANSI standard and you want to use different attachment arrows or you want it don't want automated center marks and center lines or you change your line style and thickness all that gets stored along with it now first versus third angle projection if I go to the properties of each sheet here's where you specify the type of projection first versus third angle you want to make sure you have that set up as well make sure I hit everything anchors now anchors are used when somebody adds a table to your template once they've created a drawing now if I edit the sheet format let's say I always wanted my Rev table to be anchored in that corner I can select the corner and if I expand my sheet format in my property manager I can now go to my Rev table and tell it to set anchor what that does is it specifies on the template that when somebody puts the revision table this is where the anchor is located so it will position that table in that corner as needed so there's ankles for all sorts of stuff in here okay you can set anchors for all those items moving forward as well okay alright get a little bit short on time here so now we have the two pieces together we have our sheet format and we have our sheet but how do we save them out as separate things and why do we need the sheet format separately ok let's talk about that well the sheet format as we've been talking about is our border it's our parametric notes it's our block since our logos the sheet and this should say she has our options our anchors our start drawing size stored with it the two of them together make up a template okay so I have my template I need to save out the sheet format let me get rid of the sheet here the sheet three and then one of the thing that I like to do this is optional but I like to zoom in on the border and then hit my spacebar and actually save a view I save my title block sheet one a title block sheet two what that allow is anybody using your template can hit spacebar go right through the title block with one click once they hit have all that set first thing you want to do is go to page one you want to save the sheet format okay I'm going to just save this to my desktop give it a name besides landscape and remember we have a border for page 1 and a border for page 2 the file extension is SL ddrt and you can go ahead and save that up go to page 2 and do a file save sheet format and now you're saving page 2 somewhere you want to reutilize it and then the last and final piece is to actually save it as one big bundle that's all working together which is your template and just do a save as this template which is a DR w do t and save it in a location that you can utilize later on okay and this is my Ln L template my Lunch and Learn alright we'll go ahead and save that now the template like I said stores the sheet format and the paper and all that information together like a zip file and the only reason it it would ever look for a title block again is if that dialog came up that allowed you to pick the title block now the last piece of this entire puzzle really has to do with the property tab builder because now we want to give your users a an interface to fill out that information because if you go in here let's say watermark if you go into file properties and you rely on somebody to type in watermark exactly like you linked it what if I put in water mm mark and I typed in a value it's not going to show up the issue is it has to be exact and by creating these templates these custom property tab builder templates you can make sure that it's the same every time now how do I do this it's very very simple if you go to your Start menu in in Windows and under SolidWorks SolidWorks tools you'll find your property tab builder so if your starter it'll always come up with a new tab here you have to specify whether you're creating a property tab builder for a part assembly drawing or for a weldment so in this case if it's a drawing I go ahead and specify it and we can start to group things like your see off to the right we group things in our property tab first one is my watermark definition so we we title the Box watermark definition okay and then we have to fill out what the field is going to look like in this case it's a list so I drag the list box into that grouping now what is I what do I want it to show the user it's going to pop up a little note a short cut note that says watermark the this is where it's the most important this has to be the same as the linked note so it's watermark all one word and then I can go ahead and give it a list not for production okay now the same thing goes for things like approve by you can use a list that has the names of the users that's a good way to do it if it's a date if I use a text box you have the option to use date and by selecting day as the type of box that's what brings up the calendar so your goal is to get to this point where you actually have a property tab that's specific to your drawings with all the pulldown menus everything that works with names dates calendar information and so on and this is what ties it all together so that your title block takes the information from the part from the drawing and puts it in the proper spot always gives it the proper font and spacing now from here what you're going to do to create your C size and your D size is you're going to go ahead and take this border and place it on those different sizes and scale it to create those other sizes now I also made the common why do we actually want to save the sheet format out I would I want to do that well with old drawings let's say I had one of the SolidWorks drawings here and I want to use our format we have a new format I want to use the I don't want to change the paper I don't want to change the options I want to just change the border that we're using well that's where you can go to the properties and browse to a different sheet format I can go in there and grab my my sheet formats that I want to use and I'm sure where I put them I think three of my desktop actually I go ahead and grab my sheet format and what it will do is it will go ahead and swap that out for us okay so that's why you want a sheet format I think we have some questions here so we'll go ahead and take some questions to close I think we've we've gotten through all the material here so questions we got quite a few of them first one when you're drawing your sheet format can't you just snap to the grid instead of zooming way in to make sure that your corners are on the upper spot absolutely you can use grid snap depending on your grid spacing in the number of blocks you may need to get even more refined in the snapping becomes a little bit harder because there's too many things to snap to but snapping does work just turn on your grid snap let's see did you add the dummy block then hide it no I added the dummy block created my links once I had my links done you delete it so the dummy block is used to create a view on the drawing for linking do you have a suggest for handling longer descriptions that would otherwise extend beyond the title block I currently use rap text field as a default I've seen a lot of organizations go to a different structure that is a description of like a three line description of possibility so you use three separate properties description one description two description three and you know you get the understanding that you can only have X number of characters in each line so that instead of trying to use the wrapping you can put a little bit information in each line to give that formatting correctly hopefully that makes sense is there way to make the revision history table parametric if not what is your recommendation in the revision history table so if I go ahead and insert a revision table for a moment here and I go ahead and insert a row now this field here we can't currently type in and actually tie it to a particular property so you know I kind of wish there was a way to do that I can't go ahead and add any notes in here that are parametric this is more of a manual field thing as far as I know I don't see anything coming down the pipe for this but currently not anything we can do let's see where we're at how do you edit existing property tabs so to edit existing property tabs you go to the property tab builder open up you're looking for PRT PRPs for parts drw PRPs for drawings and ASM PRPs for assemblies just open them up and then you can modify any of the fields in that's contained in those where do you save the property tab file so others can use them now it doesn't matter where you save them except that every one needs to be able to browse to that directory so typically it's going to be a server once that's on the server you're going to go to your file locations and you're going to put the path in under custom property files so you're going to point each installation solidworks to the same set of custom property files okay so as far as where it's stored it's not a requirement to be on the server but if you're going to share it from your local PC PC everyone's going to have to be able to see the folders so it's probably recommended to put it on a server is the property tab builder new for 2013 No where do you save got that when replacing a form at the property field shift positions how can I stop that I'm not aware of that I would just put that in through our support I don't I don't see that that shouldn't be an issue when you switch form formats what it should do is grab the properties that were linked from existing properties in the file in the formatting is all contained in the sheet format there may be some mismatch in you or your sheet formats so that's all

Channel: CADimensions, Inc.

Views: 58,187

Keywords: SolidWorks, Templates

Id: j3lctwKswrw

Length: 60min 38sec (3638 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2013