SOLIDWORKS What's New Archives - Computer Aided Technology

SOLIDWORKS 2023 Blog Series – What’s New Review

Ryan Field — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 16:10:19 +0000

The release of SOLIDWORKS 2023 is almost here and we’re excited about this release and all of its new features. In October, we started a blog series documenting the top enhancements of SOLIDWORKS 2023 from Part, Assembly, and Drawing tools to the new features in the SOLIDWORKS family of tools like SOLIDWORKS Simulation, SOLIDWORKS PDM, and SOLIDWORKS Visualize, to name a few.

We have been sharing them with you and the SOLIDWORKS community through our Blog (as well as accompanying videos on our YouTube channel). For your convenience, below is a complete list and links to the articles (with links to videos in them).

What’s New in SOLIDWORKS 2023 Blogs

I hope this blog series of the Top Enhancements in SOLIDWORKS 2023 gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions! As we wrap up this series of blogs, be sure to stay up to date with our upcoming events and webinars. Additionally, keep an eye out for the official release of SOLIDWORKS 2023, coming later this year.

Ryan Field
Senior Application Engineer
Computer Aided Technology

SOLIDWORKS Routing 2023 – Top Enhancements

Randy Simmons — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 15:45:57 +0000

There are many new enhancements to electrical wire routing in SOLIDWORKS 2023, which is available in SOLIDWORKS Premium. Here, let’s take a look at some of my top enhancements to SOLIDWORKS Routing 2023. As always, if you’d like to follow along with a video, you can watch that below:

Harness Bundle Enhancements

Now, when you are editing a route, just select any portion of it, and the electrical attributes will display the length and outer diameter of the harness bundle. Additionally, SOLIDWORKS Routing more accurately calculates your bundles and accounts for any unused cores.

As a bonus, it is now possible (with a button click in the Electrical Attributes property manager) to display a graphic of the bundle cross-section anywhere along the route. You can identify any unused wires quickly, as they’re displayed with a dashed line font.

Drawings in SOLIDWORKS Routing 2023

In the past, a harness drawing generally required a lot of manual editing. New in 2023, SOLIDWORKS automatically places tables closer to the connector they belong to. This makes it easier to follow your drawings and takes away some cleanup.

Also, auto Balloons for both connectors and wires now appear neatly stacked, even if you’ve deleted and re-added them.

Cleaner Connector Tables

Another handy addition to SOLIDWORKS Routing 2023 comes with your connector tables. Now, when you hover on a connector table, it cross-highlights the connector symbol and has an orange dashed “attachment line” to show which connector it belongs to. This means you can place a table anywhere on the sheet and still easily identify its associated component.

If you manually add a column to a connector table, new in SOLIDWORKS 2023 you will be asked if you want to update ALL the connector tables to match, eliminating many manual steps.

New for 2023, splices now support multiple connection points, as opposed to requiring a separate splice for each circuit.

These enhancements to SOLIDWORKS Routing in 2023 will provide improved automation to design routed systems and properly document them for manufacture.

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2023. Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2023. All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Randy Simmons
Senior Application Engineer, SW Elite A.E.
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

Design Innovation Month is CATI’s “What’s New in 2023” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D Printing & 3D Scanning technology. This year we’re going back to the future to bring you in-person events, live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes! Best of all, it’s free of charge! Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your nearest live event.

SOLIDWORKS MBD 2023 – Top Enhancements

Greg Buter — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 15:45:57 +0000

Welcome to SOLIDWORKS 2023! In this newest release, you’ll find that SOLIDWORKS MBD has also been updated with several enhancements. As always, SOLIDWORKS spends all year looking through your suggestions to improve their products and incorporates the best ones into the latest release. Let’s take a look at some of my top enhancements to SOLIDWORKS MBD in 2023. If you want to follow along in video format, check out the video below.

Improved 3D PDF Dimensions and Annotations

One of my favorite enhancements is the improvement in the display of our dimensions and other annotations. These are now viewable in the 3D views and viewports, with no data loss. This also applies to 3D PDFs showing component dimensions, feature dimensions, and DimXpert annotations.

Modify Datum for Auto Dimension Schemes

It is very common to use the Auto Dimension Scheme when you’re starting your MBD project. This tool gives us plenty of options, including Plus and Minus or Geometric Tolerancing types. For this prismatic part, we can define the datum planes by model faces. For the primary Datum, we use these four top faces together as a group. The side and bottom faces of the model will round up the selection of the Secondary and Tertiary Datums.

Next, we need to identify the model features that we want to define the tolerancing of. We do this by selecting the faces of the cuts, extrusions, and other features. Once complete, SOLIDWORKS indicates which faces are adequately toleranced with green shading.

Now, we need to modify the part design to add a boss in the middle. Looking at our tolerance status after this change, SOLIDWORKS isn’t highlighting the new geometry in green like the rest of the model.

Now, in SOLIDWORKS MBD 2023, we can edit features of items like our previously created datums. This makes it easy to add the top face of this new extrusion to the existing group of faces that represent the Primary Datum.

SOLIDWORKS MBD Wedge Feature Support

Let’s look at the cut-out at the top edge of this part. Here, we have two opposing nonparallel faces. I have some great news for you. SOLIDWORKS MBD 2023 now supports wedge features! We can use wedge geometry to define a geometric tolerance or even create a wedge datum.

Added ISO Standard Symbols

It is well known that SOLIDWORKS has a massive library of symbols. In 2022, SOLIDWORKS added additional Tolerance symbols. Well, SOLIDWORKS MBD 2023 takes this to a whole new level. You can now apply ISO 14405-1:2016 standards-based symbols to dimensions and tolerances. You can easily add these symbols straight from the symbol library, or from the Tolerance Modifier section in the DimXpert Property Manager.

MBD Helps with “Hanging” Dimensions

Here is another excellent enhancement to SOLIDWORKS MBD 2023. This machined part contains holes in overhanging geometry. It is easy to define a locating dimension to call out the vertical position of this hole. Once placed, the annotation can be difficult to interpret due to the dimension’s extension line terminating out in space.

Now, in SOLIDWORKS 2023, we have a new setting that controls the display of the dimension in this situation. In the DimXpert section of our Document Properties, we have several Display Options.

Enabling this new option for “Connect Dimension Extension Lines to Model” can make this annotation much easier to understand.

Greg Buter
Application Engineer Manager
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2023 – Top Enhancements

Ryan Field — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 15:45:21 +0000

SOLIDWORKS Inspection has always been a great tool for streamlining the creation of your inspection documentation. Whether it be your SOLIDWORKS files, or other file types, like PDFs, it helps get that previously lengthy process done much more efficiently. Over the years, there have been many additions to make this even better, and the SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2023 release is no different. Today, we are going to focus on several of those top enhancements. You can also watch this content in video format:

Standalone Inspection

The Standalone interface received a UI overhaul in 2023. It now looks more like SOLIDWORKS and better supports high resolution. Also, you will see the Manual Extract replaces the OCR extraction tool. And the Auto Extract replaces the Smart Extract, which can even work on PDFs! In some instances, this new feature could be a welcome starting point over manually extracting everything first.

Balloon Sequencing

In the SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2023 Add-In Interface, we now can create balloon sequences that can be used with multi-sheet drawings. From the Inspection toolbar, you can easily create sequences with a given starting value and remove them as needed. You can then use these during auto extraction.

Separately Balloon Drawing Sheets

Speaking of sheets, a common question I’ve heard in the past is “can I automatically balloon only a certain sheet?”. Well in the Add-in in 2023, that answer is “yes”. You can now choose specific sheets when defining Extraction Settings in the automatic extraction method.

Having ‘Include All’ checked works like previous versions. Unchecking ‘Include All’ allows you to specify sheets. Here is where you can also specify a different sequence for a given sheet, or just continue from the previous sheet.

SOLIDWORKS Inspection Manager

There are now two tabs in the Characteristics Section of the SOLIDWORKS Inspection Manager in the Add-In. In addition to the information we are familiar with in the Characteristics Table tab, there is also a Characteristic Tree tab.

Here, viewing and re-ordering are a breeze. It only contains Sheets and Views that have balloons on them.

You can re-order your sheets with a drag and drop and all balloons update accordingly. For even more granular control, you can re-order views within a sheet the same way. (Note: re-ordering will remove any Sequences you’ve used).

Control Over Exporting

Finally, since we have the ability at the beginning to specify sheets in the Add-In, it only makes sense to have that same ability at the end for both 2D PDFs and Excel templates. Once your multi-sheet inspection drawing is to your liking, you can export your ballooned drawing as a single PDF, export sheets as separate PDFs, or even specify certain sheets to export.

The same holds true for the Inspection Report.

Wrap It Up

As you can see, SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2023 makes working with this software even better, whether you’re in the Add-in or Standalone interface. If you have any questions, or would like to learn more, please reach out to us.

Ryan Field
Sr. Application Engineer
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

SOLIDWORKS eDrawings 2023 – Top Enhancements

Chris Snider — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 15:45:32 +0000

SOLIDWORKS 2023 brings some nifty updates to eDrawings. Here are the top 4. You can also watch this content on our YouTube channel:

eDrawings Support for More Non-SOLIDWORKS Files

First, the most significant update is to eDrawings’s support for non-SOLIDWORKS file types, which has not changed since 2019. Users will take advantage of updates to supported versions of ACIS, Inventor, CATIA V4, CATIA V5, CATIA V6/3DEXPERIENCE, Creo, JT, NX, Parasolid, Solid Edge, and STEP files.

After all, what good is a file viewer if the only files it can open are from the pre-pandemic era?

Display Model Measurements as Fractions in eDrawings 2023

Second, there may be occasions where you need to display model measurements as fractions. That is now possible with eDrawings 2023.

Simply open the Measure pane and under Units, choose ‘Inches’ or ‘Feet and Inches’ and then select ‘Display in Fractions’. Finish it out by entering the desired denominator for the fraction.

You also have the option to Round to the next highest fraction if the measurement does not have an exact fractional value for the specified denominator. This option will save time and reduce errors in converting measurements to fractions.

Wireframe AND Hidden Lines Visible

The third update for 2023 brings an update to Display Styles. Wireframe is now truly an option, along with Hidden Lines Visible.

In 2022, Hidden Lines Removed was incorrectly labeled “Wireframe”, and that has now been corrected.

Enhanced Language Support for Web-Based eDrawing Files

The fourth and final enhancement to 2023, and specific to eDrawings Professional, is the update to Save As Web HTML. This functionality was introduced in 2019 and is a super-easy way to create an HTML-based version of your eDrawings file.

In 2023, after opening the HTML file, there are multiple options for displaying the user interface in a localized language.

This is great! Sharing our files with users that speak a different language just got easier!

Whether it’s updates to the file types that eDrawings can open, measuring in fractions, updated Display Styles or multiple language options in HTML, eDrawings 2023 provides several enhancements that will ensure accuracy and make you more productive.

Chris Snider
Sr. Director, Software Solutions
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 – Top Enhancements

Bill Reuss — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 15:45:52 +0000

The official launch of SOLIDWORKS 2023 is fast approaching! Do you plan on being an early adopter, installing the new version as soon as possible? Have you read through the What’s New documentation for SOLIDWORKS 2023 and decided there are new features and functionality you cannot live without?

I am looking forward to the software release date for several of the included enhancements, including what will be in SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023. If you’d prefer to watch, I’ve created a video with this info as well:

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Materials Database – Material Grades

I posed this very question last year, “What would an annual release of SOLIDWORKS Plastics be without changes to the material database?”. SOLIDWORKS is, of course, updating its material database for 2023. Now, you’ll see many new, commercially available material grades in the polymer database. Additionally, we’re seeing more than 50 materials in the existing database receive updates with the latest material property values, as supplied by the resin vendors. SOLIDWORKS is also removing many obsoleted resins from the SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 material database. For those of you keeping score, the SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 material database includes resins from 196 companies, spanning 138 material families. This also includes more than 4000 commercially available resin material grades for our injection molding analysis.

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Materials Database Manager

One of the first things users will notice with the SOLIDWORKS Plastics Materials Database Manager is a facelift to the user interface. This is an interesting change that I welcome! Light colors on a white background can be difficult for some individuals to see. SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 replaces the yellow-on-white in SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022 (Figure 1) with a medium gray-on-white (Figure 2).

Figure 1. SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022 Polymer Database

Figure 2. SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 Polymer Database

The astute reader will notice that several tabs, such as Elastic Modulus and Poisson’s Ratio, have been removed across the top of the interface. I appreciate the decluttering of tabs where, in most instances, the included material property data was a constant value and not temperature-dependent. Another subtle change is moving the material polymer family and resin manufacturer name from the title bar and into separate material property fields (Figure 3).

Figure 3. New material property fields

There are a few other Plastics Materials Database Manager changes not currently in the Pre-Release version of SOLIDWORKS 2023. However, they should become available in an early 2023 service pack. For example, filled materials will include detailed fiber properties in an expandable material property field (Figure 4).

Figure 4. New fiber properties

The database will include both solid density and melt density for many resins in an expandable Density section. Also, Thermoset resin material properties will include PVT data for the cured and uncured states, Heat of Reaction and Induction Time Constants, and Ejection Conversion and Initial Conversion data from resin manufacturers, when available. The solver for SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 has also been enhanced to account for these additional material properties to improve the accuracy of Fill, Pack, and Warp simulations.

Summary and Report

In SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023, you can now access the Summary and the Report of the finished analysis separately when right-clicking on the Results folder (Figure 5). This is a simple – and great – addition to SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023!

Figure 5. Summary and Report changes

Along with this change, when accessing the Summary information, there are tabs with more content for easy access to the pertinent information from a solved SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 analysis (Figure 6).

Figure 6. New Summary information and tabs

More Reporting Options

You’ll also notice changes to how SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 creates reports (Figure 7). SOLIDWORKS removed the Classic and Light report options from prior versions of SOLIDWORKS Plastics. Now, we see an updated report template. We will also be able to select the type of report – MS-Word, MS-PowerPoint, HTML, or all formats – to generate instead of having all possible report formats created by default. This will save time if you choose a single report format.

Figure 7. Updated report generation

The changes coming in SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 are new and updated materials, a user interface change, and better summary and report options. On the surface, it seems there are only three updates for 2023. Digging into the details of each enhancement shows a lot more going on “under the hood” to make these happen. I hope you’re looking forward to SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 and taking advantage of the new features and enhancements. Now go make your products better with SOLIDWORKS Simulation!

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions in SOLIDWORKS 2023. Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2023. All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Bill Reuss
Sr. Application Engineer Specialist, Simulation
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

Design Innovation Month is CATI’s “What’s New in 2023” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D Printing & 3D Scanning technology.  This year we’re going back to the future to bring you in-person events, live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes!  Best of all, it’s free of charge! Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your nearest live event.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2023 – Top Enhancements

Nick Pusateri — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 15:44:39 +0000

SOLIDWORKS 2023 Top Enhancements in SOLIDWORKS Simulation

It’s that exciting time of the year again! This October, we get to show the public what’s new not only SOLIDWORKS 2023 CAD, but also SOLIDWORKS 2023 Simulation! Every year, SOLIDWORKS gives us new enhancements and tools to improve the performance, usability, and more of SOLIDWORKS Simulation. We review all the great customer feedback, and the developers at SOLIDWORKS use that information to improve SOLIDWORKS with each release.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the biggest new enhancements in SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2023. You can also watch this in video format:

Improved Underconstrained Bodies tool

In previous years, we used the Underconstrained Bodies diagnostic tool to detect any rigid (or free) body modes. Bodies that are not adequately supported by fixtures, connectors, or contact conditions can translate or rotate freely. The problem is that the rigid body movement did not offer a realistic visualization of the whole assembly.

In SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2023, the Underconstrained Bodies tool performs a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for faster detection of free body modes and a more realistic visualization of unconstrained displacements for the whole assembly. Also, SOLIDWORKS Simulation Professional and Premium users can use the Underconstrained Bodies tool to include contact interactions and bolt connectors when detecting rigid body modes of components. Check out Figure 1 below to see this in action.

Fig. 1 Underconstrained Bodies 2023

Penalty Stiffness Control for Contacts

New in SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2023, the Contact Penalty Stiffness Control tool allows you to set a scale factor of 1.0 to reach an accurate solution for studies with contact interactions in linear static studies. However, you can select a lower scale factor to obtain an approximate solution faster to assess design iterations and the overall behavior of the model. This will trade some contact pressure accuracy to achieve convergence easier, with faster solving times. See Figure 2 below to see a preview of how this looks.

Fig. 2 Contact Penalty Stiffness option

Bonding Between Nonfacing Surfaces

When creating bonded local interactions (contacts sets) on non-facing surfaces in previous years, the program would error out. This prevented you from creating the bonded connection in your preprocessing setup.

Now, in SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2023, we see great the bonding interaction has been improved by allowing surface-to-surface bonding on faces that are not facing each other and have no projection area between them. This new capability applies to linear static, frequency, buckling, linear dynamic studies, as well as fatigue and design studies associated with linear static studies. See Figure 3 below.

These were just a few of the great enhancements to SolidWorks Simulation 2023. The more advanced Underconstrained Bodies algorithm, the new Penalty Stiffness Control for Contact tool, and Bonding Between Nonfacing Surfaces and more will help you get convergence in your simulation results faster and with better accuracy.

Now go make your products even better with all the new SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2023 enhancements!

Nick Pusateri

Senior Application Engineer Specialist, Simulation

Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

SOLIDWORKS Composer 2023 – Top Enhancements

Brandon Nelms — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 15:45:13 +0000

SOLIDWORKS Composer is the easiest, fastest, and most robust way to create your technical documentation. There are a couple of updates in the 2023 release that will have every Composer user eager to use SOLIDWORKS Composer 2023. If you’d prefer, you can also get this content in video format:

SOLIDWORKS Composer 2023 Web Help

First, the help documentation received a MASSIVE upgrade. In prior releases, you could access Composer’s help documentation via a locally installed htm file. To access the help file, you use Internet Explorer and Java 8. Alternatively, load an Internet Explorer extension in modern browsers like Chrome. For already frustrated users consulting the help file, this htm file limitation was enough to send them right over the edge.

Legacy SOLIDWORKS Composer Help: Local file requiring Internet Explorer and Java 8

Now in SOLIDWORKS Composer 2023, the default selection is ‘Use Web Help’. When users select ‘Help Topics’ it launches directly to an online version of the SOLIDWORKS Composer help file. You don’t need legacy browsers or unnecessary browser extensions anymore!

SOLIDWORKS Composer New Online Help

This simple upgrade is a powerful enhancement to increase user productivity. Many users frustrated using the old local file limitations can now get the answers they need. As a pro-tip for users of SOLIDWORKS Composer 2020 through 2022, the links below give you access to an online version of the help file.

2020 Online Help for SOLIDWORKS Composer

2021 Online Help for SOLIDWORKS Composer

2022 Online Help for SOLIDWORKS Composer

SOLIDWORKS Composer 2023 View Collections

SOLIDWORKS Composer 2023 also sees a powerful new way to organize your views with Collections. In prior releases, organizing views was a bit of a challenge. You could rename and reorder views in the view pane with a simple drag and drop. But many times when opening a Composer file after an extended period of time or working with other users, it wasn’t clear what views belong with one another. This often led to users developing unique view naming and organization strategies that weren’t always intuitive.

Unconventional View Naming Strategies

In SOLIDWORKS Composer 2023, those confusing and tedious practices are a thing of the past thanks to Collections. Collections are custom groupings of views that streamline users’ workflows, better combining multiple views together in the view pane. Simply select the views that belong together, right-mouse-button on the View pane, and select “Add Collection”. You can reorder, rename, or delete Collections altogether. With a simple drag-and-drop, you can move views from one collection to another.

New View Collections

This new workflow for organizing your views simplifies and accelerates your technical documentation process.

Wrap-Up

Whether it’s finally using the help file now with Online Help or leveraging powerful new View Collections, SOLIDWORKS Composer continues to raise the bar as the best tool for creating your technical documentation with SOLIDWORKS Composer 2023.

Brandon Nelms
Application Engineer Manager
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023 – Top Enhancements

Joe Frank — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 15:45:54 +0000

SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023 Top 5 What’s New

Welcome to Fall! We’ve got the colors changing, the air cooling, and fast-approaching trips to the apple orchard. It’s also the time of year when we start to think about “What’s New” with our SOLIDWORKS portfolio of software! So, let’s warm up with some of my favorite enhancements for SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023 and a few that came along later in 2022 service packs (and maybe with a warm cup of cider and a donut). You can also view this content in video format:

SOLIDWORKS Manage 2022 SP Enhancements – #8 Refresh Process output

Our SOLIDWORKS Manage administrators can now make our processes a little more streamlined when it comes to updating fields between stages. In prior releases, users would have seen unnecessary stages that were for systems efforts that made things feel a little more clunky. Now as a user I can see my process or its stages exactly as they are with no “extra steps” for “other stuff” going on in the background.

#7 Automated timesheet categories

Previously, when a SOLIDWORKS Manage user started a timesheet, they were met with a blank canvas. This isn’t a problem if you have 1 or 2 items to enter. However, if you need to track dozens of tasks, the interface can be cumbersome. With the addition of the automatic timesheet functionality, SOLIDWORKS Manage users will see timesheets populate for all stages they are assigned to for the week they choose. This means that users will only need to apply the time and don’t need to search around for the correct task/stage to apply it to. Faster timesheet efforts are a good thing!

#6 Automatic update of linked record fields from the primary reference

Linked records are great if you stay on top of them. What do I mean? Well, there are limitations. One is that (until this update) they are a “manual push” from the PDM record to the linked record. If a SOLIDWORKS Manage user does not click the “update button”, the linked record info would remain static or most importantly NOT updated. With this automatic update setting, any changes to the PDM file (or record), will automatically update the linked record with the latest information. This is great for SOLIDWORKS Manage users, especially if they rely on the linked record as the source of truth for BOM’s, ERP, etc. Now they can trust that the BOM, our single source of truth, is indeed up to date.

Now that we’ve warmed up a bit, let’s head into SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023 What’s New

SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023 – #5 Performance Improvements

Performance improvements in many key areas. What does that mean for the SOLIDWORKS Manage users:

When using the Plenary web client there will be faster load times for larger PDM objects
For SOLIDWORKS Manage users heavy into Project efforts, they can expect to see faster load times for projects with high stage counts – hundreds of stages.
For SOLIDWORKS Manage users engaging their PDM Vaults; PDM Objects now have faster sync and check-in / check-out times

#4 Updated reference interface

Until this release, you were probably familiar with a very vanilla “add” screen. But new in SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, we have a new add button that gives our users a full user interface. This makes advanced searching a breeze while adding references.

#3 Else Condition Warning

Now during configuration, the SOLIDWORKS Manage administrator can warn users if there’s an else condition in place and what will happen via a custom message. For example, if a SOLIDWORKS Manage user were to want to not accept or approve a record going through a process, now they will be warned that not accepting would also close the record.

#2 Drag and drop custom fields

When users need something new added to their environment, we oftentimes find ourselves recognizing that it is often “the same but different”. Prior to this release “same but different” was not doable. Administrators had to rely on rebuilding that need from scratch and making sure it was truly the same but different. Now during configuration, SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023 administrators can easily re-order fields on the fly via drag and drop rather than the time-consuming up/down reorder buttons, thus making Manage configuration much faster.

#1 Copying BOM variants and process objects

When SOLIDWORKS Manage users need something new BOM variant added to their environment, we typically find ourselves recognizing that the need is as often said to be “the same as but different”. Prior to this release “same as but different” was not doable. SOLIDWORKS Manage administrators had to rely on rebuilding that need from scratch and making sure it was truly “the same as but different”. Now during configuration administrators can select “new from” to copy existing BOM variants. This not only makes the variant implementation occur faster, but SOLIDWORKS Manage users can ensure that it was truly a “same but different” as that is exactly how it was created.

But the “New From” capability doesn’t stop there in the Administration tool.

SOLIDWORKS Manage administrators can easily use the same right-click “New From” for process Objects. The right-click “New From” now works for both BOM Variants and Process Objects.

SOLIDWORKS Manage administrators and users alike are enjoying the latest improvements as the theme is all about making it easier and faster to configure and use. SOLIDWORKS Manage is clearly a tool here to stay and grow to its customer’s needs.

Now, go refill that cup of cider and sneak another donut.

Joe Frank
Sr. PLM Applications Engineer
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

SOLIDWORKS 2023 Assemblies – Top Enhancements in Assembly Modeling

Bob McGaughey — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 15:45:52 +0000

Over the years SOLIDWORKS has provided us, the users, with some amazing user-driven enhancements, focused on modeling assemblies quickly and more robustly. SOLIDWORKS 2023 continues that history of excellence with these new capabilities, making your assembly modeling better than ever. If you want to follow along, here’s a video version of the blog:

Assembly Pattern – Configurable Instance to Skip

Creating assembly patterns can save time and maximize proficiency. In previous versions of SOLIDWORKS, multiple configurations paired with multiple pattern features made it difficult to create the different permutations without extra features that feel…. redundant.

Now in SOLIDWORKS 2023 designers have the option to configure the instances to skip in the assembly patterns. Additionally, you can select the options for specifying which configurations are affected by those skipped instances.

Component Replace – Level of Replacement Control

For this roller assembly, we may want to switch the roller to a type with a rubberized wheel. The Replace Component command in 2023 now allows you to replace a single bearing, all the bearings in the top-level assembly, or all instances of that bearing in every level of that complete assembly. A preview window opens to provide feedback, ensuring accuracy when replacing components.

Assembly Mates – Automatic Repair Mates

During the “replace” command a rebuild error occurs. A simple mismatched face ID can derail your productivity. With SOLIDWORKS 2023, you will be excited to see a new “Auto Repair” feature built right into the context toolbar. It’s also found in the right-mouse-click menu of the mate group. The Auto Repair looks for a similar Face, Edge, Vertex, or Reference Geometry and attempts to reattach the missing items. This is a huge time saver for keeping your mates and SOLIDWORKS 2023 assemblies error-free.

BOM Part Numbers – Document Property for Default Part Number

Along with the new features making assembly configurations even more useful, our Bill of Materials has new features as well. In SOLIDWORKS 2023, a new Document property is available for the Default part number to be used in a BOM for a new configuration. You can save this setting in your template, ensuring everyone uses the correct company standard part number every time.

Assembly Features

We often need to provide access to hardware by cutting several components. An assembly cut is perfect in this situation. Even better, in 2023, we have all the standard end conditions available to us – the same as in part modeling mode.

With the feature scope modified we will add this cut to the downstream parts by using the “Propagate feature to parts”. New in SOLIDWORKS 2023, the feature scope automatically removes Toolbox components. This makes sure you don’t add unwanted features to off-the-shelf fasteners.

Optimized Resolved Mode

I’ve always suggested using lightweight mode as part of achieving maximum performance for your daily use of SOLIDWORKS. But in many cases, this requires switching between lightweight and resolved modes via context toolbars or right-mouse clicks.

In SOLIDWORKS 2023, you now have the new system option for “optimize resolved mode automatically”. This improves performance by selectively using lightweight technology when you load components in resolved mode. SOLIDWORKS hides the options for lightweight and resolved modes as the components load as resolved. Lightweight states also don’t appear in the feature tree. This allows you to focus on design and maximize your performance, while leveraging this amazing feature in 2023.

STEP Files – Save as Multiple Files

Sending very large STEP files to customers and vendors can sometimes lead to project delays due to download issues with sizable files. Based on your enhancement requests, new in SOLIDWORKS 2023, a step file export option has been added to saved assemblies as multiple files. With this enabled, SOLIDWORKS saves STEP files for the top level, sub-assembly, and individual parts. This reduces the number of file download timeouts and project delays.

With more flexible and powerful assembly features, automatic mate repair, and optimized resolved mode, SOLIDWORKS 2023 is looking up to be an amazing release for assembly designers when it comes to performance, functionality, and workflow.

Bob McGaughey
Sr. Application Engineer, Strategic Solutions
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests