Today I ran into an issue that became very frustrating while doing some detailing. This is not something that I do every day so when it became a nuisance I had to do something about it.

A while back I had a blog post about customizing the calloutformat.txt file so that the Hole Callout dimensioning tool would work according to your own company standard (who doesn’t have their own little way of dimensioning, right?). When I set this up for my company I made it so that my drill callout would follow the following format – ‘hw-diam’ (hole diameter) DR. This was great but I would have to go in and manually change the decimal dimension for the hole diameter to a fraction and I we would always have to manually type in a drill callout that was either a number drill or a letter drill.

So today I asked the question to some of the SolidWorks “experts” that I know and I quickly got an answer from Jeremy Regnerus who works for SolidWorks. The solution to my problem was quite simple after I saw it and was a little ashamed that I didn’t know it already. Anyways, I thought it would be good to post it so that if anyone else is struggling with the same thing they can fix their file also. So here is how you do it step by step.

1. The first step is to open up SolidWorks and find out where you Hole Callout Format File is. To do this go to Tools > Options > System Options > File Locations > Hole Callout Format File and then see where it says the location of this text file is and shown below.

2. After you figure this out you will need to go to Windows Explorer and find this file as shown below. If you haven’t done so already it is always a good idea to create a copy of this file before you do any modifying to it. Just be sure to name your copy something different than the original and make all of your changes to the original final named calloutformat.txt.

3. Once you open this you are ready to change your Hole Callout standards. If you are using more than 1 Hole Wizard standard you will need to do this to each standard in this file. The name of the standard will be found where the green box is below. As you can see below in the orange boxes, in all of my plain holes (or drill holes) it will dimension it as the diameter of the hole in my standard 3 place decimal. This is where I want it to call out either a fractional drill, number drill or a letter drill.

4. In order to do this all you need to do is change it from calling out the hole diameter (hw-diam) to call out the fastener size (hw-fstsze). Pretty simple huh?

5. That’s it! Now your Hole Callout dimensioning tool will look like it does below depending on your style that you set up. (Thanks to Jeremy for this screen shot.)

Note that you can also change this on a per drawing basis by selecting the Variable button inside the Dimension Text box and then selecting Fastener Size. This will insert the fastener size into your callout for this dimension ONLY!

CONCLUSION

Disaster averted! My stress level decreased rapidly today after I got this figured out and I soon became the hero of our design group when I filled them in on what I had fixed in our system files.

Thanks again Jeremy for helping me out with this and also to Jim Byrne who helped me out but just a touch after Jeremy sent a reply back.

Last week I discussed whether or not our company needed to implement some sort of a PDM tool in a blog post titled “PDM…Do We Need It?” Since I did this post I have noticed a lot of discussion on other blogs and a lot of comments on my own blog about PDM software and implementation. This is a tool that I never heard too much about other than on Devon Sowell’s blog PDM Solutions. I knew it existed but it never seemed to receive too much discussion in the SolidWorks community. This is a very intriguing tool and seems to have caught the attention of a lot of users out there.

One comment on my blog that instantly caught my attention was from Pete Yodis. His comment was as follows:

“I’d be asking SolidWorks some questions about their plans for WorkGroup. There is nothing listed for being new in 2009 and not much mention of the product on their new website. It begs the question, what’s the future hold for the product? As someone who setup, maintains, and administers my company’s WorkGroup vault that now contains 12,300 unique file names and 33,000 unique document revisions it is something that I would like to know. What’s the plan SolidWorks, and why no information? Some speculate that it will eventually be Enterprise Lite, but I’d rather know the plans and not speculate. I’d like to know what’s happening with the product that houses the 10s of thousands of files we have in there.”

This comment made me a little curious as to what was going on and I wanted to figure out what the future holds for PDMWorks WorkGroup before I invested my time and efforts into something that would not be available in a year. I emailed an employee at SolidWorks that I know and I quickly received a phone call from him letting me know what he knew about the situation. This is what I was told. This year as Pete mentioned there were not very many enhancements made to PDMWorks WorkGroup, this is not because they are going to discontinue it but because they are focusing on PDMWorks Enterprise which is their flagship software for PDM management. I understand this completely, as a company why would you invest time and money into a free tool that you package with your software when you can be spending the same time and money on making your add on flagship product even better. It makes perfect sense to me now. Not saying that I like it, but I understand. As a company that only has 3-4 designers it is not worth it for us right now to use a product like PDMWorks Enterprise but instead we can use what is available to us with a product like WorkGroup. I was also told that PDMWorks WorkGroup will still be supported like it always has been but you just won’t see the enhancements that you have in the past. As for Pete, I hopes this answers your questions and can ease your anxiety over all of your models in WorkGroup.

What does all of this mean for myself at the company that I work at? Well, add it to the list of CAD Administration things that I need to implement. The list is growing rapidly so I will need to see when I get to it. I guess prioritizing my list is not too far off in the distance and I see this implementation being towards the top of the list.

Earlier I mentioned that I have seen a lot about PDM lately in the SolidWorks community. Check out these links to see what others are saying about it.

Devon Sowell – 2009 WorkGroup PDM In 11 Steps (a must see for anyone looking to implement this in the near future)

Lenny Kikstra – Evaluating PDM Software

Lenny Kikstra – PDM In Plain English

Also, check out the comments from my post “PDM…Do We Need It?”

My answer is quite simple…YES, as long as your customers allow you to!

There is always a lot of discussion this time of year about whether to install the latest SolidWorks version at SP0. Other years I would probably say it is on a per company basis whether it is reasonable for them to upgrade immediately or not but not this year. SolidWorks focused on performance a lot this year, as you have probably already, compared to other years. This is why I feel the need for companies to upgrade immediately. Now I know what you are going to say already…but what about all of the bugs that come with SP0? I feel this year, and I believe it is the normal opinion in the SolidWorks community, that this year there are not as many bugs as in years past, actually very few compared to other years. Yes, there still are bugs, but I hate to tell you that even if you wait until SP1 or 2 or 3 or 4 you will experience some glitches at some point. I don’t believe there is a computer program out there (CAD or non CAD) that does not have a single bug in it, this is just something that you deal with while working on a computer.

With the focus more on performance this year it meant a lot less on the “really cool” new features that usually cause the majority of the bugs from my experience. What you will gain in performance with SolidWorks 2009 SP0 will more than make up for the little glitches that you will experience from time to time.

A lot of the talk about performance this year is based around 3,500 plus component assemblies but even if you don’t run into assemblies like this on a regular occasion you will still see the improvements. Assemblies of that size is not very common in the company that I work in but when I tested the software in beta and pre releases and now SP0, on my home computer, I noticed a huge difference on just the day to day performance lags that I experienced in the past. These areas range from SolidWorks load time to modeling to assembly performance to huge improvements in the area of drawings. This is why as soon as I receive my DVD’s for SolidWorks 2009 I am going to implement it at our company. You can’t afford not to, remember…TIME IS MONEY!

Now I understand that some of you work with customers that dictate what release of SolidWorks you work with and that in itself is a totally different situation. I feel if you are in that situation however that you should at least let them know about the performance increases that they will see in this release. You never know, they might decide to make the switch right away also.

If you would like to see some of these increases in action check out this video and see for yourself: Get Your Job Done Faster.

So to answer this post title again…absolutely YES! If you have any questions please feel free to comment or contact me. I would love to see everyone experience these performance gains right away.