Over the past 4 weeks I have been working on a rather large progressive die assembly for my company so much to my delight I quickly picked up on a tool that Jeremy Regnerus of SolidWorks Corp. mentioned in passing at our July 15 WMSWUG meeting.

How many of you have ever had to make a quick update in an assembly but the assembly was so huge that it took you longer to open the assembly than to actually make the change. Here is where the tip comes in, you can actually load a “preview” of the model and actually select only the parts in the assembly that you need to work on. What this does is only load those parts that you selected into memory and everything else is just there. All of your mates stay intact during this process but the components aren’t bogging down your system. Here is how you accomplish this.

Step 1: File>Open and browse to the assembly that you need to work in and single click it.

Step 2: Check the box at the bottom of the window that says Quick View/Selective Open

Step 3: Notice that the now there is a popup that appears in the upper left hand corner of your work window that lets you select either to open the Selected components or All components displayed (using display states and show/hide).

Step 4 (Only if you checked Selected components in Step 3): Ctrl select the components that you need to work on either in the working window or in the feature manager tree and then click the Open Selected button in the Selective Open popup window.

Step 5: Another popup window will then appear that notifies you that when ever you decide to show an additional component from here on out it may take longer to show these components because it is actually loading that component into memory at that point.

Step 6: Now you have only the components loaded into memory that you selected in Step 4.

Once again I want to thank Jeremy for pointing this out to me and the other attendees at our SWUG meeting.