Cadshift

A LinkedIn post earlier this year showed a VBA macro compressing a 40-minute manual batch DXF export down to seconds. It drew significant engagement because every SolidWorks engineer who works with sheet metal has written some version of this macro, or knows someone who has. The basic implementation is not complicated. Iterate assembly components, open each part, call ExportToDWG2, close. For clean assemblies with simple sheet metal parts and consistent filenames, it runs reliably. The problems surface when the assembly contains parts that don’t fit the happy path — and most production assemblies do. ...

A recent r/engineering thread on EBOM-to-MBOM translation collected 134 upvotes and 81 comments. The answers split into two camps: “PLM would fix this if companies actually deployed it properly,” and “our team of eight doesn’t have budget for PDM let alone PLM.” Both responses miss the same root cause. The problem starts in how SolidWorks generates an EBOM and what that structure cannot express that manufacturing requires. What SolidWorks Actually Gives You When you insert a BOM table into a SolidWorks drawing or export one from an assembly, you get a direct reflection of the assembly tree. Each component becomes a row. Sub-assemblies appear as parent items with children. Quantities are instance counts. ...

“Failed to create empty document.” That error message from SolidWorks when opening a STEP file means the STEP importer could not even initialize a document container before hitting a fatal problem. It is not a timeout. It is not a permissions issue. The file has structural corruption that SolidWorks’s geometric kernel cannot work around. STEP Import Error Messages and What They Actually Mean SOLIDWORKS and Inventor produce several different error strings for STEP import failures. Which one you see tells you where to start the recovery. ...

You have a sheet metal weldment with properly named cut list folders: meaningful names built from profile paths and custom properties, properly rolled up into your BOM. Then someone inserts that part into a parent weldment using Insert > Part, or you create a derived configuration that dissolves the cut list context — and every folder name silently reverts to “Sheet” or “Structural Member 1”. This is not a bug. It is a consequence of how SolidWorks tracks cut list folder identity, and understanding the mechanism tells you exactly which fix to apply in which scenario. ...

At some point, someone in your shop opens a SolidWorks part and gets this: Microsoft Excel is required for gauge tables. Please ensure Excel is installed and try again. The popup appears when the Sheet Metal feature dialog tries to open the gauge table file via OLE automation. If Excel is not present — or if it has been uninstalled after the company moved to Google Workspace or LibreOffice — the gauge table feature silently stops working. ...

If you work with sheet metal in SolidWorks, you have three realistic options for getting flat-pattern DXFs out at scale: write a VBA macro, buy PDMPublisher, or use CadShift. Each solves the same core problem — the repetitive manual export — but they sit at very different points on the complexity-vs-cost curve. This is a buyers guide, not a pitch. The right tool depends on your shop’s specific situation. The problem all three tools solve The native SolidWorks workflow for DXF export does not scale. For one part, the right-click → Export to DXF/DWG route is fine. For an assembly with 40 sheet metal parts, you are looking at 30–45 minutes of clicking through the same dialog, checking flat patterns, setting file names, and ensuring consistent layer settings across every export. Miss a part and your laser operator finds out at the machine. A detailed walkthrough of what the manual process involves is in the batch DXF export guide. ...

AutoCAD is the closest tool to the DXF format itself — AutoDesk invented DXF, and the format tracks AutoCAD versions. That proximity creates a false sense of safety. AutoCAD drawings destined for laser cutting fail for reasons that have nothing to do with version support: phantom geometry, Z-elevation surprises, splines the controller can’t handle, and blocks that CAM software silently ignores. The problems are consistent and avoidable, but only if you run a specific command sequence before every export. ...

The laser cutter doesn’t care where your DXF came from. It cares whether every cut profile is a closed polyline at the right scale with no phantom geometry hiding on invisible layers. Illustrator and Inkscape both produce valid DXF files — just not automatically. Both tools were designed for screen output, not manufacturing tolerances, and that mismatch shows up in specific, repeatable ways. This post covers what actually goes wrong in each tool and how to fix it before your file reaches the machine. ...

You build a steel frame as a weldment in one part file. Twelve identical 1500 mm long pieces of 50x50x3 square tube, plus eight 800 mm cross braces of the same profile. The cut list folder shows the right rollups: the long pieces grouped under one folder, the short pieces under another. The properties match. Then you drop the part into a parent assembly with a few other weldments, drop a BOM on the drawing, and the cut list items from the second weldment refuse to combine with the matching items from the first. Same profile. Same length. Same description. Different rows. ...

A fabricator sends you a DXF. It has the cut profile, the bend lines on a separate layer, and a note that says “10 ga A36, K=0.42”. You need to recreate it as a SolidWorks sheet metal part so you can validate fit, run interference checks against the assembly, and re-export a DXF that matches your shop’s layer conventions. There are two ways to get from that DXF to a working sheet metal body in SolidWorks. The discoverable path through the UI — Boss Extrude (Thin) → Convert to Sheet Metal → Sketched Bend — is what most users land on because every command is on a top-level toolbar. The cleaner path — Base Flange from sketch → Sketched Bend along bend lines — exists but it’s hidden behind a Sheet Metal toolbar that nobody opens until they’ve already started the wrong way. ...