quit moving on me!
January 26, 2010 3 Comments
SolidWorks 2010 introduced a lot of great enhancements for drawings. I have personally been using it since beta 1 but we rolled it out for production last week with the release of service pack 2.
There was 1 thing that immediately caused shrieks of dislike however amongst our users. The users were noticing that when you placed a dimension and then went back to edit it, the dimension would automatically move to a predefined distance. This is a new feature in SolidWorks 2010 that I needed to find out quickly how to turn off. Thankfully, this was a new feature that SolidWorks also gave us the option to turn off.
If you are seeing this same thing and you want to turn it off you can go to Tools > Options > System Options > Drawings and you will notice an option towards the bottom of the list that says “Reduce spacing when dimensions are deleted or edited (add of change tolerance, text, etc.)”. Uncheck this option and your dimensions will stay put no matter if you delete or edit them later on.
Now keep in mind, I see a HUGE benefit of having this option turned on as well. It would be nice to have the dimensions automatically space if you delete a dimension. So this is just one of those commands that you will need to figure out the advantages and disadvantages of using in your work environment.
It would be nice to be able to set a hotkey for this. I often find that I want it on, except for the occasional model where it doesn’t quite work how I expect it to. I would like to be able to toggle it off just for those, then easily toggle it back on. A button on a toolbar would work, too.
That would be a next good user interface improvement…intra-command hotkeys to toggle display or activation of a function.
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