From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS

Launch SOLIDWORKS for the first time - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS

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Launch SOLIDWORKS for the first time

- When you launch SOLIDWORKS for the first time, you're going to have a screen that looks a lot like this one here, or you may see the welcome screen, which is this one right here. And you can see at the top of the screen here, I've got parts, assemblies and drawings, which I can create here at the very top. I've got recent documents that I have looked at recently. I've got recent folders as well as some resources available to me. So all these things are in this little welcome screen here, and it allows me to quickly start either a part environment in assembly environment or a drawing environment. So the basic way SOLIDSWORKS works is you start with parts, you build them up, then you take those parts you put them together into assemblies, and then you can create a drawing of either a part or an assembly. So to get started, let's go ahead and click on part, and that's going to fire up the default template of a part, and now you can see we're in the SOLIDWORKS part environment. Okay, so let me cover the key areas inside of SOLIDWORKS. At the very top of the screen is your standard file menu. You've got open, close, save as, and so on. You've got file, view, all these different things, and a lot of the tools are available are right up here at the top. Next to that, you've got the welcome screen, you've got new document, you've got open documents, save, print and so on, okay? Directly below the file menu is the ribbon bar, and the ribbon bar is where all our main tools are going to be found for creating anything inside of SOLIDWORKS. So most of time, you're going to start with these sketch palette here, and you can see all the different tools that are available inside of there. And if your environment doesn't look exactly the same as mine, keep in mind that SOLIDWORKS is user configurable, right? I can drag and drop tools into different ribbons. I can create my own ribbons, I can do all kinds of things there. So if it doesn't look exactly the same, don't worry. Most of the key tools will always be there, starting a sketch, making lines, circles, and so on. Okay, and then once you've created a sketch, generally you going to use a feature on it, like an extrude or evolve to start creating your part. Okay, if you want to add, or are you missing a tab you can right-click on any one of the tabs, click on this one here and then come down and say like, "I want to turn on surfaces." And now you got a new tab say surfaces and inside of there, you've got all those tools. You want to turn it off, right-click, come back down here, go to surfaces and turn it off. Okay, now directly to the left of your screen is what we call the feature manager. Now that's what's going to store all the individual features that we create using the tools from the ribbon bar, okay? So we're going to start a sketch on a face of a plane to get started. And you can see here, there's really nothing in here besides these three fundamental planes. And generally you need to choose one of those three planes to get started, making a drawing, and then we're going to take that drawing or that sketch, and then we're going to extrude it, we're going to to revolve it, and we going to do all kinds of cool things to turn that into a real part. But right now let's just hold off on that until we learned about the other areas of the interface. Now, up here at the top is the view, and because we don't really have a part in there, it's not going to do us a lot of good to cover all these tools right now, but it allows you to do things like zoom to fit zoom to area, section views, change the appearance and so on. And that's all there, and we'll be jumping into all those as we go through the course. Over here on the right, you've got the solvers resources, directly below that is a tab for the design library, where you can store things like sketches and notes and even parts and assemblies, and you can easily drag and drop them into your environment. But that's all a little bit more complicated. So let's just ignore that area for right now. But I do want to point out where these tools are available. Okay, you've got the file explorer. You also have some of your appearances and scenes, and then you got the property or custom properties right over here. And then right at the very bottom of the screen, those down here, we have this IPS. If you click on that, you can choose which system of measurement you'd like to be in. It's a quick way to switch between the two. So anyways, those are the main areas inside of SOLIDWORKS that we'll be working with. As we go through the course, we'll be creating parts, assemblies, and drawings, and they all have a very similar interface that you'll be looking at. And as we get into the course, you'll be learning about all these tools in a lot more depth.

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