From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Tools Suite

Task sidebar - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Tools Suite

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Task sidebar

- [Instructor] If you need to perform a task in SOLIDWORKS, that takes a really long time or is really resource-intensive, you might considering using the SOLIDWORKS task scheduler to perform these tasks offline, outside of normal business hours when the resources are more available, Or you can wait overnight for example, for a process to take place. To open up the SOLIDWORKS task scheduler, we just go down to the start menu, scroll down to SOLIDWORKS tools, and then down below we find the SOLIDWORKS task scheduler. I'm going to go ahead and open that up. Now here, looking down on the left side, we find the task sidebar. So these are all the various tasks that we can create and have SOLIDWORKS perform for us, for example, not in the office, we're on a trip or gone overnight. So starting at the top, we first have convert files. This is going to convert any SOLIDWORKS files that we've created, in an earlier release to the current release. So let's say for example, we get a bunch of files from a vendor that we're working in and they're in SOLIDWORKS 2017, but we're on SOLIDWORKS 2019. We can use this to convert those files. We also have below that the upgrade assistant. This can help you again with those file conversions to make sure that all of the files have been updated properly. On speaking of updating files, this task below update files just simply runs a rebuild on the specific file. So you have to feel that big assembly that you want to rebuild and pull all the latest files and through the file references you can set that here. You can also do an update, that polls any associated files. So let's say for example, you have some design libraries or you have some Excel sheets that dictates something inside of your SOLIDWORKS files, you can update those as well. You can select a task for printing files, so you can print specific files using default printer or specific options at a later date. So let's say, you've have to print a large drawing package, it's, you know, a hundred sheets or something like that. You can set that up for after hours when nobody's in the office so you don't have to tie up the printer all day when people are working. You can also set up imports, so you can import step or IJEST files and save them as SOLIDWORKS files in a specific location. Export files, same deal. You can export out SOLIDWORKS documents to things like DXF, DWG, IJSTEPS, parasods and other file formats. You can update custom properties. This is going to let you add or modify custom properties at a specific time. So let's say you want to update the revision number, on a certain set of assemblies, parts of drawings all at one time, you can set that to happen, at a specific time in the future. You can automate creating drawings for parts and assemblies using a specific template of your choice. You can convert to high quality views. So let's say you were using draft quality views and all of your drawings just to keep the performance down. You can switch it to high quality. For example, before you export some PDFs or something else like that. I mean you can create your own custom tasks as well so you can work with the API and create macros that can do things like, you know, combine a number of these tasks into one task. You can also do specific operations like change sizes, change equations, things like that. It really depends on what your trying to customize. Moving down, we can also create e-drawings. So if you have a set of assemblies and part files and drawings that you want to send out to a third party, you can automate the creation of e-drawings and have those go to a specific location on your hard drive. You can also update simulations. So let's say you did a simulation analysis on a specific bracket, but you've changed the design of that bracket and you just didn't rerun the simulation. You can have Visc task scheduler operation run the simulation overnight, for example, when you have more resources available. And you can run a design checker to check your SOLIDWORKS documents against existing standards and things like that. You can program renders and animations. So if you want to schedule the rendering for after hours and animation after hours, again, this is all about having resources unavailable to you. So you want to try to choose the time when people aren't going to be in the office when stronger machines or a render farm, for example, are going to be available for use. And you can also schedule the building of ECAD files to be used by circuit works.

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