CAD Forum

Hi all,
Below is a copy and paste of what I just sent to my VAR and posted on the "other" forum. We'll see which one is better. It was nice being able to post directly in the "2d drawings area".

Wondering if anyone else has observed this behavior and if you figured out a "fixable" root cause?

We have been testing SolidWorks 2021 sp4.1 before rolling out into production.

We have discovered a repeatable behavior issue with the autoballoon command.

Auto-balloon only appears to work now if there are no “already-existing” balloons in the view or there is not an existing BOM on the drawing.

If there is a bom on the drawing and there are any already existing balloons (manually added or otherwise), no new balloons will be added after running the auto-balloon command.

We verified this behavior on three separate 2021 clients and I can demonstrate as needed.

We also reverified that at least in 2019 sp4 (our production environment), the autoballoon command, as expected, will add “missing” balloons that haven’t already been added to a view regardless if there is a bom or not.

https://www.cadforum.net/viewtopic.php? ... oon#p13532

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=184

I think one of these threads said their balloon problems were fixed in 4.1

Thanks, I reviewed that and it doesn't look quite the same as what we are seeing. Sounds like they've been messing with auto-balloon though so it doesn't surprise me that there's bugs.

Whelp, This was a nonissue. Kinda. Three of us veteran users were thrown off by the ""edit balloons" checkbox that comes up when solidworks feels like it. Seems like it has something to do with if you have an existing bom generated from the same view that you are trying to insert the balloons on... or something? Strange that we hadn't run into it until now.