What are your most impressive tricks of Solidworks

I probably should have put in the “fast forward to 2:15 to get to the presentation” to save everyone some time.
d’oh!
t

I will respectfully disagree with matt about Mouse Gestures.

Don’t worry about it. You’re not the first, and it won’t be the last time. Just wait til I start spewing heresy on fully defined sketches :open_mouth:

STOP MOVING MY BLUE LINES!!

mirror, linear pattern, circular pattern, mirror, linear pattern, circular pattern, mirror, linear pattern, circular pattern, mirror, linear pattern, circular pattern, mirror, linear pattern, circular pattern, mirror, linear pattern, circular pattern, mirror, linear pattern, circular pattern.
These will make your life sooooooo much easier.

You left one out, circular reference…

Select nearly anything, then hit CTRL A and it automatically filters for the type of thing that you selected and selects everything.

Want to select all edges of a part file? Select an edge, and hit CTRL A.

Want to select all faces of a part? Select a face and hit CTRL A.

Want to select all notes (and balloons) in a drawing file (in that specific sheet)? Select a note and hit CTRL A

etc…

Cool, but I am not sure why you would need to select all the edges or faces on a part.

it’s useful for bugged-imported-PRT, to remove some “face color”
when “remove all color” doesn’t work
but sometime the bug comes from the “imported feature” in the tree
(must apply a temporary color, to then be able to remove it)

or to count a total surface minus two or three (select all, then unselect specific)

I don’t know either…it was just an example that I knew worked. If you ever want to select all of anything, try it out.

If I recall correctly, this is what I used in the SLUGME video to quickly select all of the edges of the solid to create my weldment geometry.
(I like this method better than my old method of rt-click a face, select “invert selection”, ctrl+click to select the original face.)
t

I’ve done it to quickly select the edges to convert entities in a 3d sketch. (I learned about creating a solid body to drive a 3d sketch in a class at SW World a few years ago that was taught by Alin and one of his colleagues. See the attached file. I didn’t convert all entities in this example, but you’ll get the idea.)

Now that is cool! I never thought about doing it like that! Learn something new everyday.

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It’s tricks like that you can have in your back pocket when taking the certification exams. You need as many of them as you can find, and practice problems showing you how to use them because it can save you massive amounts of time, if for example you need to select a bunch of faces.

I wont write stuff that is already written here but i use a lot of tips from this thread.
I would like to mention that i really like orienting my view as i want by clicking surface i want to see normal and selecting another surface which will be “up” from previously selected one.

This one is amazing! I think I had heard of it before but forgot about it. Thanks matt!

I’ve got a few more here:

Assemblies and Parts:

  • Ctrl+drag to quickly copy components.


  • Ctrl+click components from File Explorer to add multiple components at once.


  • To select transparent parts/components, hold down Shift.


  • When using Offset Entities, there is an option for “bi-directional” and “cap ends” for those funky slots.


  • Ctrl+Shift+Z for previous view.


  • R for recent files.


  • Double-click a face when in a Boss-Extrude or Cut-Extrude command for a quick “Up-to-Surface” end condition.


  • Also, when in a Boss-Extrude or Cut-Extrude command, RMB in space to select end condition quickly.

Drawings:

  • Shift+F3 to toggle all caps.


  • Alt+drag to move drawing views without selecting the edge.

To build on this, if you hold CTRL+SHIFT+TAB, it will show a ghost image of all the hidden parts and you can click them to unhide them. When you let go, it goes back to the standard view.

Also, to contribute, the feature tree can be fully expanded with * (on the numpad, not SHIFT+8) and then fully collapsed with SHIFT+C.

Edit: Had the hotkeys backwards

Couple more I thought of:

Use a profile center mate with 0" dim. instead of a concentric and a coincident. Saves a little bit of time and keeps things a little cleaner. I use a macro pinned to one of my mouse gestures for this. mike miller posted the macro on the “My Macros” thread (we work for the same company).

Use the “Home” and “End” keys on your keyboard, home will jump to the beginning of a line of text and end will jump to the end of a line of text.

Also when editing mates click on the component, now instead of clicking on the mate that pops up in the breadcrumbs and then clicking on edit feature and changing the properties, RMB on the mate that pops up on the breadcrumbs and then you can change various things from that menu.