SOLIDWORKS Derived Part Template Units

If you’ve ever created a derived part in SOLIDWORKS before, then you may have come across this dialog window:

Derived Part units dialog

Not an error message

It seems like an error message, but in fact, there is nothing wrong. SOLIDWORKS is just letting you know that your default template (specified in Tools > Options, then under the System Options tab, select Default Templates from the list on the left) has different units than the document that you are using as a source.

For example, if I have a multibody inch part open and I want to use the Save Bodies command (I describe it in this blog article) to make different parts for each body, and my default template is PART-MM (which has mm as default units), then I will receive the dialog message from SOLIDWORKS:

• If I say YES, then the newly created part will use inches.
• If I say NO, then it will be converted to mm.

Note there is also a checkbox for “Don’t show again,” which while I don’t normally recommend using, works well in this case since I will always want to do the same thing every time I run this command.