The number 1 place where the company I work for suffers frustrations is when anyone is working on drawings of large assemblies.

Some background, I pushed the company that I work for to bring in someone for training that could really help and offer solid solutions. I don't know if it was luck or the gods were smiling on us but we managed to get Alin Vargatu for a day of consulting to help determine our issues and then ultimately 3 days of training. As I am sure the case is much of the time we were doing many things right but a few things wrong. Alin straightened us out and our rebuild and loading times were reduced. Unfortunately those improvements didn't do a lot for our drawings. Alin's next suggestion was detached drawings. My investigations have been fairly well documented in Matthew Lorono's thread on detached drawings starting with Alin's comment #24 here https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/54495?start=15&tstart=0 . To me it looks like detached drawings are a great start on dealing with large assembly drawings but there are so many improvements that could still be made. It also does not appear that detached drawings have had any major improvements or time invested into them for many releases.

Before we started using detached drawings we would be lucky to get two, single page customer drawings complete in a day of work. If all wait times were eliminated from the process we could easily complete 8+ of these type of drawings in a single day. It was nearly impossible to give any sort of timelines to the powers that be. Now with detached drawings detailing of a drawing is much faster but we still need to get to the point where we can detach the drawing and it can take a considerable amount of time. Large Assembly Drawings are the single most frustrating thing for everyone that works at our company to deal with. We are lucky that only 10-20% of our time is spent working in these large assembly drawings or there would be a lot more bald people working here.

I would like this thread to be a place where anyone that is having issues with the speed of drawings to post. Especially if you have clean Large Assemblies and still suffer from long load times or turtle speed when editing. This is not a thread to bash but to offer constructive ideas on where improvements can be made. What and why you need to do things and if you notice any specific commands or view types that really slow things down. If we collect some great ideas we can submit them as Enhancement Requests and then vote on the SPR's to ensure the issues we want addressed get noticed.

Thanks,

Grant