From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2017 Essential Training

Working with drawing templates - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2017 Essential Training

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Working with drawing templates

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- When we start getting ready to create drawings inside of SOLIDWORKS we need to start from a template, and if you don't already have a template predefined and given to you, you're going to need to go ahead and create your own. Now we could get by by using the default templates, but it's always a lot better to have your own company logo, company information, who drew the drawing, and everything else in that template. So to get started, let's click on brand new document, go into Drawing and click on OK. Now, by default, I need to choose one of these standard templates, and I'm going to choose this one called ANSI C Landscape, click on OK, and here's my brand new drawing. Now, I want to modify this title block down here. So to do that, I'm going to go ahead and right-click, click on Cancel, and right-click one more time, and click on Edit Sheet Format. As soon as I'm in the editing format here, I can then use the drawing tools to draw more lines, to create all types of different things, to modify this template. One of the first things you might want to bring into your drawing format, it may be a logo, and there's a couple ways to do that. The first way is to bring in a raster graphic. If you don't see a sketch picture icon up here, I can add that to this sketch toolbar by right-clicking on the toolbar, coming down here to Customize Command Manager, come over here to Commands, down to Sketch, and right down here you can see sketch picture. Let's just drag that up and place it in the toolbar. Click on OK. I can click on that button there, but it's also available under Tools, Sketch Tools, and here at the bottom, Sketch Picture. So either way, go ahead and click on Sketch Picture. I'm going to go ahead and choose this logo here. I'm in Chapter 15, 15.1. Here's my logo, click on OK, and it brings it directly in. Now I can scale that logo, get it roughly the right size, and then I can choose what type of transparency I'd like to use. This is a .PNG file, so it has some transparency built in. So if I click on From File that should knock out the background there. You can scale it, size it, and then get it in the right location, so I'm going to put that right over here for now, and then click on OK. That's the first way to bring in a picture to a sheet format. Now, I can also jump over here and use the line tool. I can continue building out my sheet format and close this. I can move things around like this line here. I can grab text, move it up and around. Let's move it outside of here for right now. Maybe I'm going to take this line here, move this up temporarily, and grab this line here. I'm going to delete that part of the line. And over here, I'm going to take this little text section, and I'm going to make it a little bit wider, so it's filling a little bit more space. And I can leave this information here as far as the proprietary or confidential, or I can just override it with something else, like the company information, and then just drag that and place it where I want. So it's always good to have kind of both, but I'm just going to give you an example of placing that in here. Let's get rid of that line right there. Bring that logo down. Place it right here. Maybe we can actually put that right at the top. Take this text down here, so we'll X out of that, click OK. Bring that down directly below it, and then maybe move this line over here. That's looks pretty good. I can always put in proprietary and confidential down here and arrange it as needed, so I can zoom in, take a look at moving things around. I can move this around here. Whatever you really want, change that around to whatever suits you for your need. You also might want to come in here and adjust your tolerances. Notice there's nothing in here, so plus or minus maybe .005. You can see here I've got some links to materials and finish and that's all built into SOLIDWORKS already for the templates, but then you might also add in a revision link or some other things like that. Notice the format they're using here, which is a dollar sign and then PRPSHEET, and then whatever it's called, Description, and that's all coming from custom properties. Custom properties are part of the individual parts themselves, so we need to go back and change or add that description into the part, and that will show up here. Once you've got your template looking fairly good, let's go ahead and exit out of the template editing format, and then go ahead and save it. So click on File, Save As, but instead of saving this as a regular drawing, I want to Save as Type, Drawing Template. Now, as far as my drawing templates, I'm going to put it in my exercise files Templates folder, and I'm going to call this one C-SIZE. Click on Save As. Now when I start a brand new document, click on New. And if I go out of the novice toolbar and go over to the advanced, I can see here that I've got a bunch different ways of pulling in templates to my documents. You can see this one here is that link to the folder in the exercise files, and there's that new C-SIZE drawing. Click on OK. And just that easy I'm able to open a brand new document using the new template that I just created. You do have to make sure that you have set up that link earlier in the course that links back to that template. So if you don't have that, click on Options, come over here to System Options, come down to File Locations, and click on Document Templates. Then you want to make sure you set up a path to wherever you're saving these documents. In this case here, I see users, my name and desktop, exercise files and templates. Now that can be anywhere on your file system that you're saving your custom templates, but you want to make sure that you do add in a path to that so that you can get at and save those files to the right location.

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