Solidworks showed me a new trick today

[Glenn Schroeder]

I'm working on a drawing for a concrete bridge railing. I prepared the initial drawing and sent it to the sponsor to review. She wanted the deck cantilever extended by 10". It was a simple fix.

The drawing had a number of notes Grouped with balloons, with the balloon first. (The balloons were linked to rebar, and the note called out spacing). After doing the edit on the concrete dimensions every grouping of balloon with note was messed up. Most had the order reversed, and the rest had greatly increased the space between them. So every one had to be Un-grouped, moved back to their former location, and the Grouped again.

Fourteen years using the software and as far as I can remember this was a first for that particular behavior.

[Dwight]

Glenn

I've never liked grouping in Solidworks. Way back we would group a dimension with a flag note. However, if you moved the dimension much, the flag would wander away from the dimension or get on top of it. We have since inserted the flag code into the dimension as text. Recently we added that as a dimension "style", so it is easy to add. But it is another work around.

Dwight

[josh]

Yes, grouping is buggy as crap. I wrote some code a while back to do some custom grouping for annotations, and I had to write a whole routine that would fix the relative positioning for all my custom groups after they got blown up. Changing view scale was the biggest culprit, although there were a lot of things that could ruin a group.

[Glenn Schroeder]

I knew it was problematic, and hadn't used it in a while, but thought I'd give it another try. One of my big gripes in the past would be copying and pasting the group, and the pasted one would come in with the annotations piled one on top of the other instead of being oriented like the original one.

[mattpeneguy]

Solidworks would be great if you didn't have to deal with drawings.

[Frederick_Law]

Solidworks would be great if you didn't have to deal with drawings it.

[Glenn Schroeder]

Solidworks would be great if you didn't have to deal with drawings.

It's better than it was 14 years ago when I started.

[DanPihlaja]

Did you know that if you hold down the ALT key while selecting an element of a group, you can move that element individually within the group?

Click on this GIF file to see an example

[bnemec]

Did you know that if you hold down the ALT key while selecting an element of a group, you can move that element individually within the group?

Click on this GIF file to see an example
group.gif

I know it's OT, but if you hold down ALT while selecting the endpoint of a dimension leader it will loosen it from where it was and attach it to a new element when you release the mouse button? ...in Solid Edge.

[Glenn Schroeder]

I know it's OT, but if you hold down ALT while selecting the endpoint of a dimension leader it will loosen it from where it was and attach it to a new element when you release the mouse button? ...in Solid Edge.

You can do that in Solidworks too, but you don't have to hold down ALT. Just grab it and move it to where you want.