Solidworks

You spend ten minutes configuring the DXF export dialog — turning on bend lines, setting the layer map, choosing which sketch entities to include. You close SolidWorks. You open it the next morning and every checkbox is back to the default. Again. This is one of the most reliably frustrating behaviors in SolidWorks, and it has a specific technical reason that most documentation skips over. More importantly, there are three concrete fixes — ranging from a template trick to a four-line API call — that eliminate the problem entirely. ...

The marketing claim that Fusion 360 has “seamless” integrated CAD/CAM is technically accurate and practically misleading — depending entirely on where your design data comes from. This comparison breaks down how each approach works, where the integration claim holds up, and where it falls apart. For background on the broader platform comparison, see SolidWorks vs Fusion 360 vs Inventor 2026. How Fusion 360 CAM Actually Works Fusion 360’s CAM environment (the Manufacture workspace) shares the same file as the design. When you switch from the Design workspace to Manufacture, you are looking at the same geometry, in the same session, with no export or import step. The feature timeline is accessible. Selections persist. When you modify the model and return to Manufacture, setups reference the updated geometry. ...

The question comes up regularly on engineering forums: what do I actually lose if I move from SolidWorks to Fusion 360? The marketing pages from Autodesk give you the answer they want you to hear. This post gives you the engineering answer — what specific workflows break, what you have to rebuild from scratch, and where Fusion genuinely earns its place. For full platform positioning, the SolidWorks vs Fusion 360 vs Inventor comparison covers pricing, kernel differences, and which platform fits which team size. This post focuses narrowly on the migration decision: you have years of SolidWorks work, and you’re evaluating whether to move. ...

A customer sends you a .stp file. It’s a sheet metal part — clearly visible bends, uniform thickness, nothing exotic. You import it into SolidWorks, run Convert to Sheet Metal, and SolidWorks does… something. A flat pattern appears. You run the DXF export and send it to the laser table. Then the first batch comes back wrong: the developed length doesn’t match the customer’s tolerance, some bends are reversed, and the corner relief geometry is completely off. ...

SolidWorks 2026 ships with AutoGenerate Drawing — an AI feature that takes a 3D model and produces a dimensioned 2D drawing with views, annotations, and BOM in the background while you keep working. LinkedIn posts about AI-generated macros and SolidWorks MCP servers are getting traction. The question is a reasonable one: if AI can generate drawings and answer questions about your model in natural language, what’s left for automation tools to do? ...

Someone emailed you a .slddrw file. Or you found one on a shared drive and need to know what it contains. This post answers the practical questions: what .slddrw actually is, how it differs from SolidWorks’ other file types, how to open it without a SolidWorks license, and what data you can and can’t extract from it. What is a .slddrw File? .slddrw is the file extension for SolidWorks Drawing files. These are 2D technical drawings — the dimensioned, annotated sheets that engineers produce from 3D SolidWorks models to communicate manufacturing requirements. ...

The checkbox that lies to you Open a multi-body sheet metal part in SolidWorks and try to export DXF. File → Save As → DXF → Options. The “Export multiple flat patterns to single file” checkbox is greyed out. So is the standard “Flat Pattern” export mode. The dialog offers you geometry, hidden lines, and sketches — everything except what you actually need. This catches shops transitioning from separate-part workflows to multi-body assembly files. The multi-body approach makes sense for welded sheet metal assemblies: fewer files, shared reference sketches between bodies, no insert-part reference chains that break when you rename anything. But the DXF export dialog treats the whole assembly as one thing and can’t figure out which flat pattern to export. ...

A fabricator needs to quote material. You hand them a bracket modelled as a solid body — not a sheet metal part, no flat pattern feature, just an extrusion with a uniform thickness. They want the raw stock area: how many square millimetres of plate does this part consume before cutting. SolidWorks Mass Properties gives you volume, surface area, and inertia. But the total surface area of a solid body includes every face — both flat faces, four edges, any chamfers or holes. That number is meaningless for material estimation. What you need is the area of one face, or equivalently, the part’s volume divided by its thickness. ...

A user on r/SolidWorks described building a car-configurator-style model. A global variable NumSlots drove both the count of a linear sketch pattern and a sweep feature that read the slot spacing. After dragging the configuration slider, the sweep updated. The sketch pattern did not. Opening the sketch, closing it without touching anything, then rebuilding — slot count finally snapped to the new value. This is not a bug report. It is a predictable consequence of how SolidWorks schedules equation evaluation during a model rebuild. Once you understand that schedule, you stop designing models that depend on the wrong evaluation order and start structuring equations so they survive a Ctrl+B. ...

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. ...