Cleanly Inserting Key Dimensions to a Drawing

When using “Insert Model Items” to import model dimensions into a drawing, the results sometimes be can be less the desirable, and moving dimensions to the correct views and location can be time consuming and laborious.

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In order to avoid having to clean-up inserted dimensions, often dimensions will be added manually. While this will avoid the clutter of inserted dimensions, there is one major drawback to this approach. Creating a drawing is often the last stage of the design process and often a considerable amount of time can pass between the start of the design and the completion of the drawing. During this period, key design information, such as precision and tolerance, can be forgotten.

A good compromise is to uniquely identify key dimensions. To this end all key dimensions can be set to “Mark dimension NOT to be imported into a drawing”. Since typically there are far fewer key dimensions and since the default setting is “Marked dimension NOT to be imported into a drawing” this approach requires far fewer mouse clicks to uniquely identify key dimensions.

Once the dimension has been set to not marked for drawing, the appropriate tolerance and precision can be added through the Dimension Property Manager.

In a drawing only the key dimensions can now be inserted into the drawing by selecting “Not marked for drawing”, from the Dimension section of “Model Items”.

NOTE: Starting with SolidWorks 2013, you can choose to only insert dimensions that have tolerances assigned.