GoEngineer Blog

Some of my favorite enhancements each year are the small ones. The ones that maybe don’t exactly allow you to do something you couldn’t do previously. Instead, they allow you to stop using a workaround to accomplish the same thing. Along those lines in SOLIDWORKS 2020 you can now save a copy of a part or assembly with only a subset of configurations.

Introduced in SOLIDWORKS 2015 Selection Sets was a great time saving feature that enables a user to grab multiple entities in a model or drawing and save those selections so you can return to at any time quickly. In SOLIDWORKS 2020 they have been enhanced to be even more beneficial.

SOLIDWORKS PDM 2020 has introduced some great enhancements to the search capabilities.There is now a quick search box in the in the File Explorer vault view. You still have access to the standard search, but this quick search is located near the standard search magnifying glass icon and is not tied to any search card. That’s right, you can use this without setting up a card in advance.

If you have ever performed a 100% beam element study in SOLIDWORKS Simulation, then you will have likely run into the issue that when you create a mesh, the dialog box does not show up with meshing options. The beam elements are meshed the exact same way every time.

 

With SOLIDWORKS 2020 Chain Dimensions, they have added another way to improve productivity when creating drawings. Chain dimensioning is when each dimension is placed directly adjacent to the next dimension without any gaps between the dimensions as shown below.

In SOLIDWORKS 2020, you can expect many great improvements to multiple areas of the installation experience. The SOLIDWORKS Installation Manager now uses parallel threading, which is a fancy way of saying you’ll experience faster downloads of SOLIDWORKS software.

SOLIDWORKS Manage 2020 brings with it plenty of new features regarding processes. Here are a few of them detailed out a little more.

New for SOLIDWORKS 2020 is Flip Width Mate Alignment, the ability to flip the Mate Alignment of a new or existing Width Mate. This will even let you reverse the alignment of a width mate for assemblies created in older releases of SOLIDWORKS. The alignment buttons normally would be greyed out at the bottom of the Advanced Mate dialog box.

Introduced in SOLIDWORKS 2019, SOLIDWORKS 2020 markups are more powerful, easier to work with, and are now available without the requirements of certain hardware.