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Gone Over to The Dark Side - And Hate It

I wasn't talking about sketch orientation as much as physical geometry limitations. Sometimes the 2D sketch you want to reference just can't be selected so you have to constrain to other edges.

A big improvement to SW's sketcher would be to dump the unreadable, tiny chiclet constraint icons for something simpler like Pro|E's. Much more readable.
 
Bart B. wrote:
What is the relationship with CATIA to SW?

Dassault owns CATIA & SW, bought SW back in 97 for the GUI. Richard Doyle has a a good article on this here: http://blogs.solidworks.com/swcommunity/2006/05/solidworks_a nd_.html

I just got back from SW training yesterday, the instructor said CATIA can open SW files. Based on the link above, I'm not sure if this is true. Was hoping someone has both packages and could answer this question for us.

My thought is Dassault is utilizing a typical and effective "sandwich" marketing strategy of using SW to capture the lower dollar seats & simpler modeling, and keeping CATIA as their high end package. This forces Pro/E to compete in the middle for marketshare, which can be difficult.

Has anyone tried using Catia to open a SW file?

Bart Genovese
(the other Bart
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)
 
Does anyone have a good solution for Solidworks wanting to save new items to whatever directory you last opened something from? I just almost saved a drawing to my template library rather than the directory the model was in because I had made some template corrections. While the working directory idea in Pro/E is sometimes a pain, since we have no PDM system and put most models in one directory for a project, I wish I could have Solidworks start with the directory I am working in when I want to open a file or if I want to save a new file.

Carrie
 
Having used Pro/e from 1997 to 2007 and going through all the alterations, I can say that Pro/e is a powerful tool. But ultimatly you have to produce drawings in order to get things made or to show customers. For that Pro/e is light years in front of Solidworks.
I am now using SW and it was really easy to pick up from Pro/e but the one things that really really sucks in the drawing creation. Oh my god..... It goes against any of the drawing standard you come accross. They have made it easy to use but allowing a monkey to create drawing that could ressemble nothing....
In drawing you have rules and SW does not follow them and worth let you do what ever you want. It allows you to drop views whereever you want and they not even related to each other meaning that you could projected view on the wrong side. Displaying and creating parametric notes and dimension are abismal.

But you can produce some nice model...

Which means: produce model in SW and make the drawings in Pro/e.
 
Today's thing that I wish Solidworks had - the ability to select a surface and replace where it is referenced by all features with a different surface. I miss replace reference a lot. (Should have just started this model over from scratch rather than trying to fix it.)
 
Im really liking works 2011;)

I could make a list of improvements. I wonder if anyone from SW is monitoring this forum or is there not enough traffic?

I hear that SW will start soon to use the Catia kernel. Any comments?
Edited by: design-engine
 

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