Still Redneck

Well Tuesday was the SWUGN Technical Summit in Naperville, IL outside of Chicago.  It was a very good group with roughly 130 attendees, several good presentations, and a wedge salad that I liked quite a bit.  To find out when there will be a SWUGN Technical Summit near you check out this sight.

SWUGN Info

As we usually do with an event like this, Josh Altergott and I took the chance to get a little Redneck.  We presented "Redneck Workarounds -- The SolidWorks Answer to Duct Tape and Bailing Wire".  We had a lot of fun making fun of bizarre fixes, my accent, and Josh in general.

We mentioned during the presentation that we would make the slides available through the blog so it is attached to this posting.  Download Redneck Work Arounds.  I hope everyone gets something out of it.  Even if the fixes and workarounds in the presentation are not directly helpful to you; maybe you will be inspired to think a little redneck when you run into a difficult situation.

We decided this time to freshen-up the content a bit.  We removed a few obsolete workarounds and added a few that are a bit more pertinent.  My favorite new work-around is probably "The Disappearing Dialog Box".  Here it is:

The Problem:

My Measure dialog box is no longer visible on the screen.  
  

The first potential workaround:

Change the resolution on your screen to be the max allowed.  Sometimes when a user has the resolution set real high the dialog will get pushed to the edge of the screen and then when the resolution is set back to a lower level the dialog box stays at the original coordinates that are now off scree.

The second potential workaround:

1. Edit the registry key that is the position holder for that dialog box HKCU\Software\SolidWorks\SolidWorks2010\General  


2. Find the "Measure Dialog Position" entry


3. Edit this key, delete any/all values, OK


4. Run SolidWorks and try Measure

I hope that this helps some folks out there but remember; it is your registry.  Be very cautious.  You can kill a machine if you are not careful.

Thanks,

Adrian

 

DWG editor gone? Don’t Panic!

SolidWorks customers that are on subscription will find a small change to the editor when installing service pack 3.0.  Mainly the fact that it is gone!  Ok, relax, it isn’t really gone, it has gotten a new face lift along with a name change.    For service pack 3.0 the DWGEditor will be called the SolidWorks 2D editor.  The product will also be a separate download and install.  For some users they will need to take a closer look at what is going on when they run an upgrade to their previous version. 

On my machine I ran a standard upgrade using the installation manager.  Once the upgrade was complete I noticed that the old SolidWorks 2.1 installation was still in the add remove programs group.  I have seen this before so I had a pretty good idea what was going on here.  Since the upgrade to service pack 3.0 does not contain an upgrade to the DWGEditor the programs group for 2.1 remains in the add/remove programs.  The install files for the SolidWorks 2D editor are a separate download and a separate install.  This means that to remove the old DWGEditor files you will need to uninstall that product separately.  For those of you using the admin image for deployment you can add the removal of this to the preinstall batch or the post install batch.

Dim Palette, get out of the way!

Go ahead, you can admit it.  At first, you didn't like the new dimension palette (and maybe still don't).  You know what I'm talking about.  You click on a dimension and the dimension palette dialog box pops up and you end up clicking in it.  The complaint we get the most is "It is just in the way".  I didn't like it at first either, but it is a good feature that really reduces the amount of mouse travel.  The problem is the "old" users or as I like to say "experienced" users are used to doing it a certain way.  New users seem to really like it.  Before you even ask, no, you can not turn off that option.

However, help has arrived!  With the new release of Service Pack 3.0, you now get a much smaller icon when you select a dimension and a choice if you want to use it or not.  Not only that, if you choose to use the dimension palette, you can move it to where ever you like.  Finally!!  The best thing about this change is that SolidWorks actually listened to their customer baseand made the changes we asked for.  It's nice to know someone is listening to us (do you hear that Washington D.C.).   Upgrade to SP3.0 this enhancement along with many others!!

Old way:

New way:

 

Enjoy!!

Phil Whitaker

Solidworks 2010 SP 3.0

Solidworks has released service pack 3.0 for 2010 as of April 27th. Log into your customer portal or start your check for updates to download it.

Todd Werginz

CATI