Alignex Blog

Every year, SOLIDWORKS offers a new major version release of the software. With that comes hundreds of updates and enhancements. Some updates are small and may go unnoticed by some users, but we also see very powerful enhancements such as new sketch, feature, drawing or assembly tools.

Convert Entities and Offset Entities are two powerful tools you can use when editing a sketch in SOLIDWORKS. Let’s begin with the Convert Entities tool.

Whenever we need to make a sketch entity that matches other geometry of our model we can use the Convert Entities tool. Using the Offset Entities tool we can do a similar thing, but rather than using the exact entities we can instead do an offset from the entities that were used to create another feature.

The SOLIDWORKS Help menu is a great resource for discovering how to use different pieces of SOLIDWORKS. The Help menu can be found inside of SOLIDWORKS by going to Help > SOLIDWORKS Help. This will bring up the online help menu where you can browse topics on the left side pane. Or, the search functionality near the top will help find what you are looking for very quickly. You can also access different versions of the help menu if required.

Every SOLIDWORKS user has a basic understanding of how file references work. We typically make a part then create a drawing that shows views of this part. When creating the views on the drawing, what is really happening is the drawing views are looking at the actual part file and displaying it in a way that is based on our view settings. We say that the drawing references the part file.

Have you ever wanted to be able to import information from an image file but didn't have the original data?  Well we've got you covered. Join Alignex engineer Eric Weber as he walks you through the process of creating X/Y plots on any picture you can find. 

We here at Alignex receive a lot of questions regarding the functionality of the SOLIDWORKS software. One of the questions we receive often is how to take a standard image file and make it compatible with your Draftsight software. In this video, Alignex engineer Eric Weber walks you through the step by step process of how to convert any image file into a DXF file. 

This how-to blog post will take you step-by-step through the process of installing your SolidNetwork License Manager (SNL). Installing your SNL is the first step to upgrading your client computers.

Have you ever wanted to test multiple versions of a part or drawing without the fear of ruining the original design? Well it's possible in SOLIDWORKS, and a lot easier than it may seem.

One question that often comes up from users of SOLIDWORKS Simulation and SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional (formerly SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM) is how to handle the simulation results files? This can be a difficult question to answer not always knowing different company’s policies. However, we do have some recommendations for using the two applications together.