Drawing-Automation

Most SolidWorks engineers reach for VBA when they need to automate something. It’s right there in the Tools menu, no build toolchain required, and the macro recorder gives you a starting point for anything the GUI can do. Batch exporting drawings from the PDM vault is exactly this kind of task — repetitive, time-consuming, and automatable. What’s less obvious is where VBA’s limits are, and how to get PDM state awareness without switching to a C# application. ...

Pack and Go through the UI is fine for a one-off operation. When you’re doing it repeatedly — versioning a drawing before a revision cycle, archiving a job package, moving a drawing to a different project folder with all its references intact — you want a macro that runs Pack and Go, tells you where the new file landed, closes the original, and opens the copy. The SOLIDWORKS API supports all of this via the IPackAndGo interface, but the documentation examples stop at SavePackAndGo and leave the “then open the copy” part as an exercise for the reader. ...

Exporting a hundred drawings to PDF before a design review is one of those tasks that eats an afternoon. With SolidWorks PDM, there are three ways to automate it: the built-in Batch Plot tool, the SolidWorks Task Scheduler, and a custom API script that talks to both PDM and SolidWorks. They’re not equivalent — each has hard limits that determine which one fits your situation. What SolidWorks PDM Batch Plot Actually Does SolidWorks PDM Professional includes a Batch Plot tool accessible from the Windows Explorer PDM client. Right-click a folder or a selection of .slddrw files → Batch Plot. The tool opens SolidWorks in the background (PDM handles the license check), iterates through the selected drawings, and exports them to a configured output path. ...

The request surfaces a few times a month on r/SolidWorks and in engineering Slack channels. Someone has two hundred parts. They need a drawing for each one. Same template, same three views, title block linked to the same properties. They want to leave it running overnight. The top replies say “use Task Scheduler” or “ask ChatGPT to write a macro” and the original poster comes back in a week saying neither worked. ...