Assembly-Management

A supplier discontinues a product line. You need to find every SKF bearing in a 600-part machine assembly and evaluate alternatives. With the standard Select menu you can hunt them down individually — or you can open Advanced Component Selection, type vendor = SKF, click Apply, and have every matching component highlighted in 3 seconds. Most SolidWorks users have never touched this tool. It sits one click off the cursor menu and handles property-based selection that would otherwise require a macro or a full PDM search. ...

You open a SolidWorks drawing, insert a BOM table, and two extra columns appear with headers “hide1” and “hide2”. They contain no data, they don’t correspond to any custom property you’ve defined, and deleting them fixes the problem — until someone inserts a new BOM from the same template and they’re back. This is a BOM template corruption issue, and it’s specific enough that most Google searches for it return outdated forum threads pointing at deleted Dassault knowledge base articles. Here’s what’s actually happening and how to fix it permanently. ...