Selectively Opening Components in Your Assembly

Posted on June 23rd, 2008 in Assemblies, Productivity, SolidWorks by The SW Geek

We have all had them, extraordinarily large assemblies that brings your computer to it’s virtual knees every time you open them. Sometimes you just want to work on a small area and opening an assembly is painfully slow. In 2008, SolidWorks introduced a new tool to help you in these situations: Quick view / Selective open. The Selective open tool opens your assembly with only minimal model information being loaded into memory, allowing you to select which components in the assembly you wish to open. When accepted, only the selected components will be shown but all your mates will be retained; allowing you to work on your assembly without killing you poor little computer.

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The Appearance of Things - Display States

Posted on June 13th, 2008 in Assemblies, Configurations, Productivity, SolidWorks, ToolBars, User Interface by The SW Geek

After reading Part 1 and Part 2 of The Appearance of Things, I hope you have found it easier to change the appearance of your parts. Now I am going to show you how to tie it all together using Display States. Like Appearance Callouts and the Display Pane, Display States are nothing new but I do not see nearly enough people using them. I see way too many people using configurations to control the display of assemblies when Display States are way better. Creating configurations to hide and show components works fine but it can be slower then using Display States. Changing configurations reloads each component as if it were a new one, Display States doesn’t load components.

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