Drawing

In Document Properties > Units, the Mass/Section Properties row has a Decimal Places dropdown. Pick any preset — 1, 2, 3 — and the drawing obeys immediately. Pick Custom and nothing visible happens. No input field. No dialog. No spinner. Just the dropdown label sitting there showing “Custom” with nowhere to type the actual number. This is a genuine SOLIDWORKS UI quirk that affects several versions. It is not a bug in your drawing or your template. ...

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. ...

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. ...

A question on the SOLIDWORKS User Forum asks whether there is any way to automatically create an offset rectangle from a drawing view’s bounding box. Kevin Chandler — one of the most prolific responders on that forum — gives the short answer: “Auto? No, unless via the API.” That’s the entire opening for this post. The native UI does not support it. The API does. The use cases are real and recurring: inspection templates with a fixed clearance zone around each view, nesting documentation where each part gets a border at a set offset, supplier drawings where the view boundary needs to be marked explicitly for DXF nesting software. All of them need the same thing: a rectangle drawn in the sheet sketch, offset from the view’s outline, assigned to a controlled layer. ...

A question on r/SolidWorks last week: can you make flag note ⑤ in a drawing appear automatically in the BOM cell for line item 1? The answers suggested balloons, linked notes, and custom properties — all partially right, none complete. SolidWorks does not have a native mechanism for this. What it has is a custom property workaround that approximates the result, with specific limitations that trip people up. What flag notes are (and are not) A flag note in SolidWorks is a drawing annotation with a bordered symbol — typically a circled number like ①, ②, ③ — stored in a flag note bank. You create them via Insert → Annotations → Note, check Flag Note, and assign a border shape and symbol from the PropertyManager. Once created, a note can be added to the bank with Add to Flag Note Bank, making the symbol reusable across sheets. ...