I have installed it but we are using 2019 due to the Windchill version we have not being compatible.
That said, one nice little enhancement that is sure to not make the “flashy feature list” is when you double click dimensions to edit, it no longer delays to show the Property Manager for the dimension. The edit box shows right away. It’s not perfect though, adding a new dimension and placing it still delays the edit box waiting on the Property Manager. I’ll take every little bit I can get though.
I hadn’t even noticed that one, since I keep Instant 3d turned on and generally edit dimensions with a single click, but there are a few other nice enhancements (while none of them blew me away, they have made my life a little easier).
I like being able to set a default mate type for slot mates in Document Properties, since I don’t believe I’ve ever wanted anything other than “centered in slot”.
The context pop-up for sketch relations in Drawings was long overdue, though I’d like to have a talk with whoever made the decision to have it not appear if the last item selected was model geometry instead of a sketch entity. That little glitch added to my firm belief that at least some of the people making decisions about implementing enhancements have never actually used the software.
I’ve had this problem with 2020 that the RMB menus on features with fail or warning icons don’t work. Is that an issue in 2021? Also maximizing the SW window when there are multiple windows requires you to select one and wait.
Same here as well. I have noticed a few more crashes every day but I believe it’s because I have the MasterCam for Solidworks Add-In installed. Nearly every crash I have is when I’m using that Add-In.
Waiting for Service pack # and higher before the jump and also License server needs to be upgraded for this to happen for SW2020 and 2021, what a pain with a yearly upgrade every 12 months!!
Still using 2018 and 2019
I loath the thought of trying to put together a “test plan” for updating to a newer version. I’ve done some rough numbers on hours and direct cost to update and I cannot honestly go to the money people here saying it’s a good investment. The only real reason for us to update is to not get so far behind the wave that the complexity of updating grows exponentially with each year. From what I’ve seen I won’t do anything less than an SP4 and that has to be out for several months. We’re on 2019 SP4 and might go to 2021 very late this year or early next.
When I came back to SW from SE, I had to catch up on 5 releases. That was a lot of learning, and some of the most important stuff is in the fine details. It took a while to catch up, and probably I still haven’t after a few years. It might be best to limit upgrade cycle to 2 or 3 years.
Depends on your setup.
I had 4 versions installed and able to run them all together.
Currently I have 3: 2019 SP5, 2020 SP4, 2021 SP2.
2020 SP5 refused to install.
Beside the program installed in different folders, all other files are in different folders also.
To prevent maxing up versions.
I’ll install SP0 as soon as I can and copy files there to test.
This is a big reason IMO. Skipping releases means more things get broken that you have to deal with at once. I might skip one version but not more than that. Ironically, Windchill has forced the issue. We just went to 2019 and until we upgrade Windchill to version 12, we are stuck since v11 doesn’t support the newer versions of SolidWorks. And Windchill looks like its a beast to upgrade.
2021 vs 2020 has some good stuff (check out the www.solidworks.com/whatsnew), but the unsung hero is probably all the work under the hood on graphics performance – especially in Drawings it now uses the new ‘graphics pipeline’ that’s been around a few years. On top of that, a ton of quality work, i.e. fixing SPRs.
Yeah, they keep saying that they are focused on bug fixes. It’d be nice if they would feature freeze for a year or 3 and only fix bugs though. Seems every time they add a new feature it has bugs. I was so excited about the 2020 feature to be able to use envelopes only to drive in-context features. It seemed a good way to make sure that you don’t accidentally create relations, but when I tried to use it and messed up I’d get thrown into almost a perpetual loop (you may have to click on the image for the video to show, new forum and I’m not sure, but it’s not showing in the preview):
I still can’t get an answer as to when the new Structure Systems that’s supposed to replace Weldments will be ready for production use…I was more than slightly annoyed that they finally added the ability to use a spline (which I considered a bug), but only added it to SS, not Weldments because they’ve “stopped development” on Weldments.
PDM: only one at a time and must test “everything” on a few updated clients connected to a test PDM server rig before updating production servers. Well, that’s what I’m told anyway, I’ve never done it.
I was hoping that some of the regressions would be fixed in the interim releases that were skipped over so I wouldn’t need to explain the lost time for each one.