Quick Conversions On The Fly

How many of you have to do a fair amount of dimensional conversion between inches, millimeters and centimeters?

At our company we do all of our modeling in inches but there are a fair amount of our customers that send us hard copy prints that are fully dimensioned in metric units. I would then have to spend some time manually converting these dimension over to inch so that we could model the part correctly. It worked but it ate up time that I could be designing. Well, I found out the other day that there is a easier way to do this without having to go into Tools>Options every time and change my units for that file and then when I was done have to go back in there and change them back to inch units.

You can do it right inside your dimension input boxes while you are sketching/dimensioning. I know there are probably a lot of you that are saying to yourselves right now…he is just finding this out? The answer is yes, I know, I am ashamed but I figured that if I just found this out there may be others out there that don’t know you can do it also. Back to quick conversions, when you add a dimension to a sketch or feature you get a dimension input box as shown on the right. To do your conversion all you need to do is enter in the number you need converted followed by the unit it is currently in (i.e. mm, in, cm) as you can see in the picture below. Simple as that!