Doing it by the book In recent years, I have witnessed a noticeable decline in the quality of drawings. As more emphasis is placed on models and assemblies, good drawing practices are neglected. I cannot not even count how many drawings I have encountered that seemed to not only not follow any known standards but [...]

The other day I was showing a user the Instant3D on-screen rulers when they asked me about its precision. I was asked what is to keep users from arbitrarily creating models without any regard to the values being selected. This is definitely a possibility and probably will happen with less experienced users but the on-screen [...]

With a show of hands, how many are guilty of faking leaders in drawings? How many times have you or someone you love made a copy of a balloon or annotation and placed it on top of another? Just for the second or third leader, you sacrifice the integrity of the drawing. Come on, be [...]

One of my favorite new features in SolidWorks 2008 is the addition of Shortcut Bars. Shortcut bars are customizable floating bars that pop up in the graphic area near your mouse pointer. By default each environment has its own shortcut bar that you can then customize just like another toolbar. With Shortcut Bars in addition [...]

The first release of the SolidWorks 2008 removed the scroll bars from the graphic area. The development team at SolidWorks decided to remove the scrollbars “as many users requested their removal since they did not use them at all and the just took up graphic space.” If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe [...]

As a SolidWorks administrator I encounter a number of questions regarding SolidWorks that I plan to pass on to the users of SolidWorks Geeks. Recently my company rolled out SolidWorks 2008 to our users and I was expecting a huge number of questions regarding the CommandManager, Instant 3D or even the overall interface. If you [...]