Pdf-Export

Generating SolidWorks drawings manually — open part, new drawing, place views, fill title block, insert BOM, save PDF — is fine for a handful of parts. At scale it becomes a bottleneck. The SolidWorks API exposes every step of that workflow, and a well-structured macro or add-in can generate complete drawing packages for an entire assembly in minutes. This post covers the full pipeline: creating drawing documents from a template, adding model views, populating title block annotations from custom properties, inserting BOMs, and exporting to PDF. Both VBA (for quick scripts) and C# (for production add-ins) approaches are shown. ...

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. ...