Ever since I started using SOLIDWORKS back in 1998 all the way through to today (SW 2016), I have consistently been mystified by the voodoo of the Area Hatch/Fill property manager, especially when hatching section views of multibody parts or assemblies.  I have found that if I do things in a very specific order (like a Soup Nazi customer) I get what I want (usually), but if I stray at all from the script it's "NO HATCH FOR YOU" and once done wrong, the mess cannot be undone.

I do a lot of drawings showing multiple steps of a process.  The models will have configurations names Step1,Step2, etc.  Each step is a separate view and the hatching of the components or bodies between views should be consistent.

My current best practice is as follows:

1.   Create a section view of the first step.  The automatic SW hatching is rarely up to my standards so I will need to adjust.
2.   Select the hatch I want to modify
3. In the Area Hatch/Fill dialog change the 'Apply to' dropdown to 'Body'
4. Tweak the hatch style, size, scale, etc as desired
5. Select 'OK'.
6. Repeat steps 2 through 5 for the remaining hatch areas
7. Copy/Paste the section view multiple times so that I have a view for each step of the process.  This saves time because the pasted copies will already have the correct hatching.
8. Change the model configuration of each view to match the step it represents.  If the configuration causes new components or bodies to be shown, adjust the hatching of the new items using steps 2-5 above.

I never select 'Region' or 'View' in the 'Apply to' dropdown and very rarely do I select 'Component'.  I have never understood the logic of that dropdown and I have found that if I perform Step 4 before Step 3 above, the hatching becomes permanently tied to 'Region' or 'Component' and any attempt to apply a hatch to the body will result in nothing happening.

Right now I'm fighting with a drawing created by someone else in which the hatches were made with a mishmash of 'Component','Body' and 'Region' for the 'Apply to' setting.  In one view with 4 bodies, there are 8 hatched areas.  Five are set to 'Body', one is set to 'Region' and two are set to 'Component'.  The other views have different distributions of the three.

All I want to do is get rid of the 'Region' and 'Component' hatching and replace it with the correct 'Body' hatching, but it seems to be impossible.

If anyone has any insight into the inner mystical working of this property manager page, please enlighten me.