How to Open a File in SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer

Welcome to another very basic tutorial of how to use SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer. Today, I’m going to be discussing how to open a file. It might seem pretty obvious until you start looking for the Open icon only to discover that there isn’t one! That’s because SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer makes use of the 3D Experience platform, which uses a completely different file storage philosophy than SOLIDWORKS. With SOLIDWORKS, you have individual files that are stored on your local hard drive, or perhaps in a network location. The files get passed back and forth, get overwritten (either intentionally or unintentionally). In the 3D Experience platform, the files are meant to be used collaboratively, and even combined in a very unique way – but that’s a story for another day.

So, you spent a bunch of time designing something that looks really cool in SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer yesterday, but today you come into the office and launch the program and are greeted with a new part. How do you open yesterday’s part (or any other part for that matter)?

File Open Process

We are going to click on the Search field (not the magnifying glass). This opens up a dropdown.

Step 1: Click on the Search field to get this dropdown

From here, you have two options. If you had saved it but didn’t give it a meaningful name (or forgot what you called it), then you can click on the My Content option in the dropdown. This will give you a list of all the files you have created.

My Content

Alternately, you can choose the Search option from the dropdown and then type the name of the file.

Search for “hand”

To open the part, simply double-click on it and it will open. If you single-click the part, it will give you some more detailed information about the file as shown in the screenshot below:

Single-clicking the part gives you this

Interested in SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer?

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