Make sure to pay careful attention to the dimensions section as fully defined sketches and features are the only way to ensure your model doesn’t fall apart when you change something later.As a professional engineer or CAD technician, it’s important to keep your skills honed. One feature of the UI that I use often is the mouse gestures since you don’t have to move your mouse very far to change to a common action.

Additionally you can tailor your UI to your liking from changing keyboard shortcuts to completely rearranging the toolbars around the graphics area. The UI of SOLIDWORKS may seem a bit overwhelming on first glance but really there are just 5 different ways to one action and as you continue to use the software whichever way feels most comfortable to you will become apparent. This is a very useful element of editing as you can go back to an earlier stage of your model or assembly without much effort and then when you move the bar back down SOLIDWORKS will automatically rebuild your model or assembly with the changes you’ve made. If you hover over your cursor will become a small hand which you can use to pull that line up suppressing any features underneath it. An additional function of the FeatureManager is the rollback bar which is that thin blue line at the end of all your features. It will place parent drawings to feature in essentially a folder under that feature.

Another Key element to the SOLIDWORKS user interface (UI) is the FeatureManager Design Tree which lays out all the elements of your model or assembly in a tiered system. While these may feel like just simple terms it is very beneficial to know these terms for future applications within the software. One key takeaway from this section is the terminology overview on pages 14 and 15.

In this Chapter you get a lot of information about the bare basics of navigating and eventually using the software.

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