Customizing Your Vault’s Columns for a More Personalized View

PDM is a powerful tool that can make your team even more efficient with the right customizations made to your vault. Customizations like personalizing what columns are included in the file explorer of your vault can make navigating the vault easier. While the preview tool is great, it can still be time-consuming to use it to try to gather more information about a file. To acutely find out what a user is looking for, customizing columns allows users to get a snapshot of files at a glance. Below we will go over how to customize the column views in the vault using the PDM Administration Tool.

To customize what columns are included in our file explorer, open the PDM Administration tool, log in as the admin, and open the columns node. Once the column node is expanded, right-click on the “File List Columns” and choose “New Column Set”.

Once “New Column Set” is chosen, the Customized Columns dialog pops out and opens up where we can create a new column view. Under the Columns tab, we can add, delete, and reorganize the columns to be included in the file view. Under Sort Columns, we can choose an overarching organization for how the columns will be listed either ascending or descending.  Under Columns we choose which variables we want to be included, the name is seen in the vault file explorer, the width of the column as seen in the file explorer, and the alignment (left/right).

To add a column, choose “Add” and then under “Selected Column” indicate the variable and its properties that you would like the column to include. The Customized Column pop-up gives the option for several standard variables and then also created variables. While creating the column, it can be specified if the variable will be looked for in all configurations or just prespecified configurations. Once the column has been created the arrows under and to the right of the columns table allow them to be reordered individually. The Permissions tab allows the administrator to specify who the created column set up applies to. The permissions can be designated by either user or group.

Column personalization in SOLIDWORKS PDM allows for more efficient navigation through the vault. Furthermore, the added benefit of personalizing column views based on group/user allows for the admin to personalize the file view to benefit the users most.