SolidWorks 2010 Bible

Part II: Building Intelligence into Your Parts

Options

The Options settings determine the behavior when you are using the Allow model edits option and

a new item has been configured. For example, the design table may already exist and you manually

add a configuration and suppress a feature.

Configurations that have been added manually are displayed somewhat differently from configs

that are being managed by the design table. Figure 10.26 shows the two configurations at the bot-

tom of the tree with square symbols, while the design table configs have Excel symbols.

FIGURE 10.26

Manually created configs versus design table–created configs

After you manually add the config and suppress the feature, the next time you open the design

table, the Add Rows and Columns dialog box appears. Many users are simply annoyed by this, but

that may be because they do not understand what it does or why it appears. In the example shown

in Figure 10.27, a new configuration has been manually added; it appears in the Configurations box

as ManuallyAddedConfig, and in the Parameters box, it looks like a feature named BodyChamfer

has been either suppressed or unsuppressed manually. The appearance of this dialog box means

that SolidWorks is asking you if you would like to include these items in the design table. If so, sim-

ply select the items you would like to add to the design table and click OK. If you do not want to

include the items in the design table, then simply click OK or Cancel. If you click OK, you will not

be offered these choices again; if you click Cancel, the next time you open the table, the dialog box

with the same choices will reappear. If you never want to see this dialog box again, then make sure

that all the options in the Options panel shown in Figure 10.21 are deselected.

Editing the design table

As I mentioned earlier, when you open the design table inside the SolidWorks window, it can

sometimes be difficult to work with. One way to handle this problem is to only edit the design

table inside SolidWorks when you want to add new features to the column headers, and when

adding new configurations or editing the field values, edit the table in a separate window. This

option appears on the RMB menu as Edit Table in New Window. It gives you much more flexibil-

ity in resizing the Excel window, changing zoom scale, and other operations, but it does not enable

you to double-click a dimension so that it is added automatically to the column header.