I’m upgrading the office soon from 2019 SP5 , to 2020 SP5 since I’ve learned to lag about a year behind on versions in the event there a service pack that has allot of issues. With that, we’ll be following in line with those who no longer have access to Explorer.
Has anyone run into an instance where this really created a problem for them? From what I can tell, moving it to the menu shouldn’t create too many downsides, however I did like using explorer to repair broken references that sometimes arose from doing Pack and Go functions that had suppressed components within them. We use alot of virtual components here, and the Pack and Go has been notorious for not treating those items kindly and losing track of its temporary file location. Thus when you open the assembly in your new location, those parts have gone missing. Using the “Save As” with references as a follow up operation was a work around to this, but the downside is those suppressed components weren’t making the trip.
I’m hoping if I run into this circumstance in 2020, I’ll still be able to repair those references easily.
Thanks for your feedback, and also .. it’s nice to be on a CAD forum you can actually navigate!
I’ve missed it a couple times. If your project has multiple windows explorer folder levels and you don’t have all the referencing assemblies open the internalized tools don’t see the extra assemblies. Previously if you knew there was a folder that contained referencing assemblies you could simply point the Solidworks Explorer there. But this is something I’ve only ran into twice in the last 6 months not not exactly a common occurrence.
I don’t miss it, but I don’t like the new “file open” interface. (I think it changed when they took away solidworks explorer. Maybe it’s been this way longer than that.)
Yeah, I thought at a minimum that you could at least see all of the references associated with each part or assembly up front so you knew if you needed to re-associate something. I imagine I’ll be in a similar situation where it won’t need addressed often, but it will be frustrating when it happens and there’s a way I used to be able to resolve it easily but now - no dice.
This always puzzled me. Opening a file is the most basic operation and they’ve invented about 15 different ways to query what you want to find for just (3) different file types. It’s become very convoluted..
Go figure, you go over there and ask them how to view where a picture you’ve uploaded was used in order to locate that specific post, and the answer they give you is how to add a description to a picture.
Still on 2019, but curious, can you rename files in explorer as that was the only function I used that was part of Solidworks explorer, been a long while since I used that directly
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Also do you still have the option of changing a reference on a drawing or assembly
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Regards,
Jim
Renaming files will be the same in 2020 - you’ll just only have access to the RMB menu that you show in your first pic and no explorer as a second option.
Changing references should be possible as well with the “replace” function, but the real downside to me is that you can’t see the “full path” structure that you could in explorer - so your not really sure if there’s a reference that exists that may need to be re-associated to the model you want to point it too. However …
It seems to me you’ll have to use a combination of the RMB menu & the References button - One to change or replace the location and one to view the references associated with the model or drawing.
I usually do renaming in SW assembly.
When you change the name in the tree, it could change the filename also.
From there, you could search for “where used”, ie other assembly and drawing which used that file.
Like zxys001 I kind of miss it but rarely used it because I would open it and go for a cup of coffee while I waited. It was nice to be able to find all of the where used locations but because of the slow operation I have found workarounds for anything else you could have done with it.
Same here. I liked it, but not its slow speed, so I haven’t used it in years. Honestly I didn’t even know it was gone.
I always wondered why it didn’t run an indexing in the background and update as you made changes, but then I’m just an engineer and logical questions like that are not allowed.
Seems like the consensus based on the small sample size here is that I’ll probably run into a few instances where it could have been helpful, but I won’t notice 99% of the time. Hopefully the instances that make it a necessity in the first place get fixed in future versions… we will see.
Same here, but like with so many SW enhancements, I was frustrated by the implementation. Why didn’t they extend that feature to allow re-naming Parts and Assemblies from a Drawing?
That’s one I don’t think ever made it to the 5% threads started by Alin on the old forum.
