Getting Started with SOLIDWORKS Composer

If you are new to the SOLIDWORKS Composer product, there are a number of extremely helpful free resources available for you to learn and quickly become a Composer expert.  Many people may not be aware of the great resources available to them right within the Composer product.

Turning on the “Getting Started” Composer Workshop you should see a number of Help options on your right side panel.  Another way to navigate to the same resources is to simply click on the Help button in the top right-corner of your Composer interface.  Here you will see a number of extremely useful resources, but most notably in my opinion the “Getting Started” and the “Video Tips” resources.

SOLIDWORKS Composer Help Options

The SOLIDWORKS Composer Getting Started resource will send you directly to an online content database, and provide you with a number of best steps and guides to getting started with your Composer product and this guide is called composer user guide.

The default browser on my machine is google chrome, clicking on the contextual help or getting started leads me to the browser with empty page.

This composer user guide has some Active X controls which causes the content to get blocked on most of the machines and browsers and user guide appears empty as shown below.

Empty page – content blocked

However, one good thing about this empty page is we could note down the path where this guide is located/saved on our machine when we installed composer. On my machine I manually browsed to path as shown above on my empty browser page.My SOLIDWORKS Composer has (3) in bracket because I have multiple versions of composer’s installed on my machine.

C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS Composer (3)\help\ENU

Once you locate the file “dsswxcomposerdoc.htm” in ENU folder, try opening it directly or try using different browser.I tried internet explorer and it allow me to unblock the content and I could access the user guide.

Composer User guide

You could also utilize “Video Tips” resource which links to the SOLIDWORKS Composer YouTube channel which provides numerous short training videos for both those brand new to using SOLIDWORKS Composer as well as advanced topics for experienced users.

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS Composer

To learn more about Composer, we invite you to attend a SOLIDWORKS Composer Essentials training course either in a Canadian city near you or live online.