Creating configurations using the "Alternate Position View" function

In this video, I illustrate how to create configurations to show the range of motion of a solidworks assembly. The configurations are created at drawing level within Solidworks using the "Alternate Position View" function. Please leave a comment should you have any questions regarding this function. Hope you enjoyed this quick tip!

This Video was created by Solidtec Solutions Application Engineer Suraj 

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Configuring the SolidWorks Toolbox

The SolidWorks Toolbox is a database of commonly used fasteners and parts, available if you have SolidWorks Professional or Premium. You can customise the Toolbox with your own part numbers, descriptions and other fields you may wish to show on a Bill Of Materials.

This video shows you how to customise the Toolbox to reflect the fasteners you use in your designs, and how to quickly add a large number of properties to those parts using Microsoft Excel.

The Toolbox runs off a database which contains all of the available sizes and dimensions for each part it contains. When you select a certain component for the first time in SolidWorks, it generates that particular configuration or part based on the dimensions contained in the database. If you wish to change the size of an existing Toolbox component, and the new size has not been used before, you need to RMB on the part (on-screen or in the Feature Tree) and select “Edit Toolbox Definition”. This will open the same original Toolbox Property Manager box, and generate the new config when you press OK.

Alternatively, from the Toolbox Configuration window, from the same button where you export settings to Excel, you can choose to "Create configurations" to generate all configurations for the component. This means you can use the ordinary method of changing configs in the assembly. But be careful using this – I did it on the bolt in the video with 198 configs and the result was a 25Mb part file. If you choose to do this, make sure you remove unnecessary bolt sizes and lengths first - you can always add them back in later.

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Searching SolidWorks Web Help from the Firefox address bar

Following on from a previous post, if you use Firefox as your web browser, you can create a custom bookmark to quickly search the SolidWorks Web Help directly from the address bar.

1. In Firefox >> Bookmarks >> RMB in the drop down menu somewhere >> New Bookmark
2. Name: SolidWorks Web Help Google Search
3. Location: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahelp.solidworks.com+%s
4. Tags: ignore
5. Keyword: sw
6. Description: Fill in if you like


7. Click Add

Now, go to the address bar (keyboard shortcut CTRL+L), clear it and type “sw colour design table” without the quotes, and press Enter – SHAZAM!

Of course, you can create other custom bookmarks – the “+%s” tells Firefox to add whatever you type in the address bar to the web address preceding it. In case you’re wondering, web addresses can’t contain colons (:), so the colon in “site:” needs to be replaced with %3A.

The Keyword field determines what you need to type first into the address bar to use the bookmark so make it something short and easy to remember.

If you're using another browser, don't despair, most browsers should have this functionality - a bit of Googling should show you how to do it.

Here's a way to do the same thing in Chrome.
Here's how you can do it in Internet Explorer.

Happy searching!

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Searching SolidWorks Web Help through Google

Since SolidWorks 2010, by default the Help documentation launched from the application is stored online as a series of web pages, known as Web Help – this ensures it can be kept as up-to-date as possible.

But don’t worry if you don’t have internet access – when you launch the Help file you will be prompted to open the offline copy installed on your machine instead. And if you don’t like the Web Help, you can disable it by unchecking SolidWorks >> Help >> Use SolidWorks Web Help.

Because the Help files are now online, you can browse them through your normal web browser:

2011 SolidWorks Help - Welcome to SolidWorks Online Help

Rather than using the in-built Web Help search field in the top right corner, you can search all help documentation using Google.

In the Google search field, type “site:help.solidworks.com” without the quotes (note there is also no space between “site:” and “help.solidworks.com”), followed by your search terms – voila!

Searching through Google gives you the benefit of more relevant results, although this isn’t as much of a problem with the SW Web Help search if you know the title of the page you’re searching for.

However, here’s an example where we don’t know the title of the page; we want to know the formula used to configure part colour in a Design Table (as you’ll see, it’s not something you’d memorise!).

Searching for the keywords “colour design table” yields these results:

• SW Help Search
• Google, limited to help.solidworks.com

The page we are after is the first result through Google, but only the 7th result through the Web Help search.

The “site:help.solidworks.com” term in the search above limits your search terms to the SolidWorks web domain hosting the help files. You can use this to force Google to search any web domain – one I also use a lot is “site:en.wikipedia.org” which searches all English-language Wikipedia articles.

You can also learn about more advanced Google search features:

• http://www.google.com.au/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861
• http://www.google.com/landing/searchtips/#helpcenter

Happy searching!

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