SOLIDWORKS Replace Sketch Entity [VIDEO]

Doesn’t matter if you are The Company Owner, a Manager, a SolidWorks Expert or just a SolidWorks Beginner, you will be extremely happy taking advantage of the most important enhancement introduced to SolidWorks this year: the ability to replace sketch entities.

As the owner, CEO or manager you will notice how much faster your design team will be able to change their design intent during all phases of the design process. What before would take them hours can be done now in seconds. Moreover, the number of errors in your drawings and, ultimately, in your products will decrease by an order of magnitude!

If you are a SolidWorks Power User, a large portion of your work time was most likely dedicated troubleshooting and fixing your colleagues models after they changed their design intent. Due to the myriad of possible relationships between sketch entities, edges, faces, features, mates and in-context designed components, any simple change to a sketch up on the tree had the potential to stain completely your feature tree with ketchup and mustard. I know excellent SolidWorks users who wasted the best part of their working day just doing this kind of troubleshooting because this is what was perceived as being the most valuable for their team.

If you are a SolidWorks Beginner, you were most likely dreading changing the design intent of complex parts by modifying sketches at the top of the feature tree. The moment you saw all that red and yellow after the rebuild, you either felt lost or, if you were lucky to have one, you went to your more experienced colleague asking for help.

Good News! SolidWorks 2014 frees you from the tyranny of the feature tree with a very elegant solution: the ability to replace sketch entities. Please watch this video to see this new functionality put through a very intensive batch of tests.

Note: This video was made using SolidWorks 2014 Pre-Release 1 version. I am sure that this functionality will become even better and more powerful in the commercial version and in future service packs.