Cadshift

Why BOM Cells Turn Blue When you manually edit a BOM cell in a SolidWorks drawing — typing directly into the cell to change a description, quantity, or part number — the cell background turns blue. This is intentional behavior, not a display bug. The blue indicates an override: the cell value is no longer driven by the corresponding model custom property. SolidWorks decouples the cell from the model the moment you type in it, and it marks that decoupled state visually so you (and anyone reviewing the drawing) know the value in the BOM doesn’t necessarily match what the 3D model says. ...

What SolidWorks Automation Actually Means “SolidWorks automation” gets used for everything from a 20-line VBA macro that renames a file to a full production-grade COM add-in that processes 10,000 parts a night. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is measured in months of development, not hours. This guide maps the territory. Four automation approaches cover almost everything teams do with SolidWorks programmatically. Each one has a ceiling. Knowing which ceiling you’re about to hit before you write code saves rebuilding the same solution twice. ...

A Reddit post last year with 44 upvotes caught a lot of engineers off-guard: Save As PDF in SolidWorks exports your entire model space, not just what’s visible on the sheet. If you or anyone on your team has ever put notes, costs, internal comments, or supplier-specific details off to the side of the sheet border — those are in the PDF you just emailed. Print to PDF clips to the visible sheet boundary. That is the central difference, and everything else follows from it. ...

Right-click a feature, choose Parent/Child, and you see 12 children listed. Open Display/Delete Relations on the sketch — nothing. Enter Edit Feature — no explicit references to those children. Where are these relationships hiding? This is one of the most common sources of rebuild failures and change-propagation surprises in SOLIDWORKS. Features that appear independent are connected through mechanisms that don’t show up in the usual places. This post maps every source of non-obvious parent/child dependencies and shows how to find and break them. ...

At some point, every mechanical or civil engineer gets handed a shapefile or GeoJSON and told to “do something with it.” Usually it is site boundary data for a facility layout, parcel boundaries for a land survey, drone-acquired point cloud footprints, or utility infrastructure from a municipal dataset. None of these came from SolidWorks or AutoCAD. They came from GIS, and they arrived in a format you may never have opened before. ...

The scenario: a supplier sends fifty SolidWorks parts. The files land in the PDM vault. The PDM admin manually fills in the data cards — material, description, part number, revision. Everything is correct in the vault database. But the files themselves have no custom properties. Any downstream tool that reads properties directly from the file (a drawing, an ERP integration, a batch export macro) sees blanks. The natural fix — run the built-in Task Scheduler “Add/Update Custom Properties” task — breaks the data cards. The task adds the file properties and then syncs them back to the data card. Because the file properties were blank when the task ran, the sync writes blank back over the values the admin entered. ...

A SOLIDWORKS user on the 3DEXPERIENCE forum recently posted a batch macro that failed to compile with “Invalid Character.” The macro tried to parameterize a Task Scheduler run with syntax like $$$FOLDER_PATH$$$ and made API calls to CustomPropertyData. Josh Brady identified it immediately: “That is AI-generated code. CustomPropertyData is a hallucinated call. It does not exist in the SolidWorks API.” This failure pattern is now common enough to deserve a direct explanation. SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler has no built-in parameter syntax. VBA macros cannot receive command-line arguments. There are no token substitutions in macro source code. Here is what works instead. ...

A sheet metal enclosure for an elliptical staircase, a conical shroud split into two halves for shipping, a large cylindrical tank section cut into panels for laser cutting — these all share the same fabrication requirement: a curved sheet metal body that must be divided into manageable pieces, each with its own flattenable geometry and its own DXF. SOLIDWORKS’s Split feature appears to solve this. It doesn’t. Applied to a curved sheet metal body, Split divides the geometry but destroys the flat pattern capability on every resulting piece. This post explains why that happens and gives three approaches that actually preserve flattenability. ...

A r/SolidWorks thread from last week: an engineer built a macro that exports a DXF, renames it, and drops a PDF in the right folder. It works on their machine. When they try to run it on a manager’s laptop or a shop floor PC, it crashes with a COM exception or silently does nothing. The replies cover the symptoms but not the root cause, and nobody agrees on the right distribution approach. ...

A r/SolidWorks thread from last week: user exports a sheet metal part to DXF, sends it to the laser shop, gets a call saying the file is corrupt. The file is 20MB for a bracket with three bends. The shop’s nesting software chokes loading it. The user is exporting from the drawing, not from the part. This is the most common DXF export mistake in SolidWorks, and it is invisible until something downstream breaks. ...