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What specific functionality from MS Word would you like to see in SOLIDWORKS annotation note tool?

on Feb 14, 2018
Latest reply on Oct 3, 2018 by Matt Peneguy

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There are often requests that SOLIDWORKS should have more MS Word-like functionality for notes. We added some capabilities, such as uppercasing, better control over spacing between paragraphs, better indention behavior, etc. In the continuing effort to improve functionality in SOLIDWORKS, please state what additional functionality from MS Word that would you like to see in SOLIDWORKS annotation note tool.

Examples: Is there a formatting style that SOLIDWORKS doesn't currently support? What about highlighting? Do you think it would valuable to double-justification, where the test is kerned to fit within the space, but not compressed or stretched? How about superscript and superscript?

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Alex Lachance Feb 14, 2018 11:16 AM
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Hey Matthew,

I'd really like the capitals/lower case button to be added if it isn't already.

Also, perhaps make it compatible with Antidote so that we can use it to correct what we wrote.

I'll add more as I think of them. I passed the word around my office to get some suggestions.
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Todd Blacksher Feb 14, 2018 11:16 AM
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I don't do a lot with notes, but it would be nice to have some of the standard MS Word keyboard shortcuts -
Ctrl + I/B/U (Italic/Bold/Underline)
Shift & Ctrl+Shift + Arrow Keys (Quickly selecting text)
Ctrl+Shift+</> (Decrease/Increase Font Size)
There are a bunch of others that I do without thinking, but these are the ones that I use the most.
Thanks!
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Dan Pihlaja Feb 14, 2018 11:22 AM
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Matthew Lorono wrote:
Examples: Is there a formatting style that SOLIDWORKS doesn't currently support? What about highlighting? Do you think it would valuable to double-justification, where the test is kerned to fit within the space, but not compressed or stretched? How about superscript and superscript?
1) I would like to see this functionality. The kerning that is represented in Solidworks right now doesn't make sense to me. I don't know anyone who would want their text stretched or compressed to fit a space.

2) I don't know the programming behind it specifically, but the way that notes work right now is kind of flaky. There seem to be a lot of graphical issues with being able to see the placeholder (carat?) or knowing where it is. (See my reply here: drw note, text box caret ).
On this same note, I would love to see something similar to how tables work hand in hand with Excel, where you double click on a note and you can edit your note in Word, then save and close and your note is ported in from Word. Of course, I could see things going wrong with this as well.

3) I would like to see the ability to add columns to notes, similar to Word's columns.

4) Of course (we have talked about this before in other threads, and even in different ways), but Word has a "restrict Editing" function that I would like to see in our notes. Something that would keep people from accidentally grabbing a note and moving it. Of course the way we talked about it before was possibly adding a layer in the drawing that you could put a note on that would be viewable, but not editable until you changed the layer function. But alternatively, you could add a "restrict Editing" function to a specific note so that it can't be moved or edited unless the check box were turned off.

Hope I didn't go off on too much of a tangent.
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Kameron Smith @ Alex Lachance on Feb 14, 2018 12:29 PM
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Good one, Alex Lachance. I've been hoping that SolidWorks would allow Shift+F3 to toggle case on selected text, as it's already a feature of Windows. That should be in the software across the board.
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Walter Fetsch Feb 14, 2018 12:32 PM
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On a slight tangent, I'd be grateful if you didn't lock us into having to buy MS Word.
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Dan Pihlaja @ Kameron Smith on Feb 14, 2018 12:41 PM
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Kameron Smith wrote:

Good one, Alex Lachance. I've been hoping that SolidWorks would allow Shift+F3 to toggle case on selected text, as it's already a feature of Windows. That should be in the software across the board.
That is already a feature. Just select the note and hit Shift F3
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Alex Lachance @ Dan Pihlaja on Feb 14, 2018 12:47 PM
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Doesn't work for me on 2016 SP4.0, perhaps I'm outdated.

Regardless, I didn't know there was a keyboard shortcut. It should be in the format toolbar imo.
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Dan Pihlaja @ Alex Lachance on Feb 14, 2018 12:51 PM
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It worked in SW 2015:
Can you force text to be lowercase? (see Matthew Lorono's response)

Don't be editing the note. Just select it and SHIFT F3
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Alex Lachance @ Dan Pihlaja on Feb 14, 2018 12:56 PM
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Dully noted, as you stated it works while selecting the note, not while editing it. I'd still like to have a button added in the toolbar for the majority that do not know the keyboard shortcuts. Why hide these features? We have retyped several notes just because of this...
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Matthew Lorono @ Alex Lachance on Feb 14, 2018 1:01 PM
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For text, this button is kind've redundant since there's a setting in the PropertyManager for it on notes already. We did add this button for Tables in SW2018, though. It's somewhat important to note that MS Word covers sentence case, all uppercase, all lowercase and a couple of other cases. Most of these do not have value in Engineering Drawings, so only all uppercase is supported. When you turn all uppercase off, it restores your original entry rather than loosing what you entered as you would in Word.
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Matthew Lorono @ Alex Lachance on Feb 14, 2018 1:02 PM
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Alex, it's a setting in the PropertyManager when you highlight an annotation note. You can also set the document default in your Document Properties of your drawing template.
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Alex Lachance @ Matthew Lorono on Feb 14, 2018 1:23 PM
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I didn't know that Thanks for mentionning it.

I still think it should be in the bar though or else it's counter-intuitive. The first place I looked for was the text formatting bar which is where I believe it should be. It would make your bar more standard and similar to the Word one. The text font is in both the format bar and the property manager, why not put this one in it too?
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Josh Brady Feb 14, 2018 1:41 PM
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How about some type of "show special characters" function where the SWML is shown for the note as-created? Or even some official documentation on it. I guess it's mostly API-related, but there have been a number of times that it's been helpful to understand how to create formats with the <> type tags. Currently (as far as I'm aware) the only way to learn that stuff is to create a note manually, apply whatever formatting you want, then use API to read the text of the note to get the formatting tags.
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Dan Pihlaja @ Josh Brady on Feb 14, 2018 1:50 PM
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Josh Brady wrote:

How about some type of "show special characters" function where the SWML is shown for the note as-created? Or even some official documentation on it. I guess it's mostly API-related, but there have been a number of times that it's been helpful to understand how to create formats with the <> type tags. Currently (as far as I'm aware) the only way to learn that stuff is to create a note manually, apply whatever formatting you want, then use API to read the text of the note to get the formatting tags.
Do you mean these? (this was taken from CalloutFormat.txt file located in the file locations area of your settings.
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Jeremy Feist @ Dan Pihlaja on Feb 14, 2018 1:52 PM
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3) I would like to see the ability to add columns to notes, similar to Word's columns.
yes - Columns would be good.

and on a tangent (since I don't think this is in Word), being able to link the numbering for auto numbered notes across sheets would go very nicely with the flag note bank. (kind of like splitting a table and moving part to another sheet, but for numbered notes).
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Igor Fomenko Feb 14, 2018 2:17 PM
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Please add super and subsript and enlarge allowable number of characters in stacked note. it is limited to 8 characters only.
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Dan Pihlaja @ Igor Fomenko on Feb 14, 2018 2:22 PM
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Igor Fomenko wrote:

Please add super and subsript and enlarge allowable number of characters in stacked note. it is limited to 8 characters only.

Yes!!
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Josh Brady @ Dan Pihlaja on Feb 14, 2018 2:23 PM
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Dan Pihlaja wrote:

Do you mean these? (this was taken from CalloutFormat.txt file located in the file locations area of your settings.

That's the tip of the iceberg, sir. Please paste the following text into a new note and watch what happens. I don't know of anywhere that this is documented.

The first line of this note
Second line
<PARA indent=10 findent=0 indentStep=10 bullet=on paraSpace=0.001 lineSpace=0.001 flagNote=false flagNoteId=-1 DNSPeriodState=1>Bullet 1
<PARA indent=20 findent=10 indentStep=10 number=on ntype=1 nformat=$$. nstartNum=0 numOrder=0 paraSpace=0.001 lineSpace=0.001 flagNote=false flagNoteId=-1 DNSPeriodState=1>REady for a fraction? <STACK size=0.8 valign=top>16<OVER>Denom</STACK>
Here's a different font
And back to standard, but smaller
Shall we specify in actual height instead of pts?
<PARA indent=10 findent=0 indentStep=10 bullet=on paraSpace=0.001 lineSpace=0.001 flagNote=false flagNoteId=-1 DNSPeriodState=1>Here's what it does when you embed a note or balloon: <OBJECT ID="330">
Change the color? OK...
You can add borders to <border type=6 size=0 padding=0>part</border> of a note
<PARA indent=20 findent=10 indentStep=10 number=on ntype=1 nformat=$$. nstartNum=0 numOrder=0 paraSpace=0.001 lineSpace=0.001 flagNote=false flagNoteId=-1 DNSPeriodState=1>Even just the <STACK size=0.8 divider=no><border type=4 size=0 padding=0>top</border><OVER>of a stack with way more characters than the interface allows</STACK> you to use
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Josh Brady @ Dan Pihlaja on Feb 14, 2018 2:34 PM
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1-1JKQ4MN wrote:

Igor Fomenko wrote:

Please add super and subsript and enlarge allowable number of characters in stacked note. it is limited to 8 characters only.

Yes!!
If you'll note, this is not a limitation of the notes themselves but a limitation of that dialog box. Using SWML, you can make your stacks as long as you want. You can even embed stacks into stacks if you want to...

The first line of this note
Second line <STACK size=0.5 divider=yes><border type=4 size=0 padding=0><STACK size=0.5 divider=yes>top<OVER>TEST</STACK></border><OVER>of a stack with way more characters than the interface allows</STACK> you to use
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Dan Pihlaja @ Josh Brady on Feb 14, 2018 2:37 PM
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Josh Brady wrote:

Dan Pihlaja wrote:

Do you mean these? (this was taken from CalloutFormat.txt file located in the file locations area of your settings.

That's the tip of the iceberg, sir. Please paste the following text into a new note and watch what happens. I don't know of anywhere that this is documented.

The first line of this note
Second line
<PARA indent=10 findent=0 indentStep=10 bullet=on paraSpace=0.001 lineSpace=0.001 flagNote=false flagNoteId=-1 DNSPeriodState=1>Bullet 1
<PARA indent=20 findent=10 indentStep=10 number=on ntype=1 nformat=$$. nstartNum=0 numOrder=0 paraSpace=0.001 lineSpace=0.001 flagNote=false flagNoteId=-1 DNSPeriodState=1>REady for a fraction? <STACK size=0.8 valign=top>16<OVER>Denom</STACK>
Here's a different font
And back to standard, but smaller
Shall we specify in actual height instead of pts?
<PARA indent=10 findent=0 indentStep=10 bullet=on paraSpace=0.001 lineSpace=0.001 flagNote=false flagNoteId=-1 DNSPeriodState=1>Here's what it does when you embed a note or balloon: <OBJECT ID="330">
Change the color? OK...
You can add borders to <border type=6 size=0 padding=0>part</border> of a note
<PARA indent=20 findent=10 indentStep=10 number=on ntype=1 nformat=$$. nstartNum=0 numOrder=0 paraSpace=0.001 lineSpace=0.001 flagNote=false flagNoteId=-1 DNSPeriodState=1>Even just the <STACK size=0.8 divider=no><border type=4 size=0 padding=0>top</border><OVER>of a stack with way more characters than the interface allows</STACK> you to use

Holy crap!

I had no idea!

Did you know that you can't even CHANGE the font once you have all those characters in there?
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Scott Lyon Feb 14, 2018 2:52 PM
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I would very much like to have the ability to quickly change text color by simply highlighting the note and making the selection from the Property Manager. As it is now I have to d-click the note to get into edit mode then select the text and finally change the color. Lots of extra steps. I don't know if that counts because it's not something directly related to the MS text editing interface but I'll give it shot just because other formatting options do become available on the left side of the screen like Text Format.
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Igor Fomenko Feb 14, 2018 11:57 PM
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Sorry for a little deviation from original question but it is old and adjacent problem.
Please add vertical alignment of sketch text to guide line. This simplify our life a lot. Now it is necessary to set Font Size in two places.
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Josh Brady @ Scott Lyon on Feb 14, 2018 3:04 PM
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Scott Lyon wrote:

I would very much like to have the ability to quickly change text color by simply highlighting the note and making the selection from the Property Manager. As it is now I have to d-click the note to get into edit mode then select the text and finally change the color. Lots of extra steps. I don't know if that counts because it's not something directly related to the MS text editing interface but I'll give it shot just because other formatting options do become available on the left side of the screen like Text Format.
It's not in the note property manager, but you can select a note and click "Line color" and change the color of a complete note.
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Scott Lyon @ Josh Brady on Feb 14, 2018 3:11 PM
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Hmm, yep that does what I was after. Much appreciated.
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Matthew Lorono @ Alex Lachance on Feb 14, 2018 5:17 PM
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Alex, I know. In SW2018, the icon for the button you'll see for All Uppercase in the Table's bar was originally designed for the Note's bar a few years ago. However, we have to make UI choices based on many factors. Although we aren't averse to adding new buttons to the pop up bar, we do have to be cautious about overloading it, thus artificially creating the need for further UX choices that may obfuscate the interface due to its sprawl over time. Something we place there has to serve a specific purpose within the context of that bar. In this case, the buttons on the note's bar are for selected text. All uppercase option applies to the whole note, which serves the widest use case. As such, it was felt that the setting should be placed in the PropertyManager only, so the planned button was not added. This was my choice in conjunction with input from the UX team. I would love to put all the stuff up in the immediate interface, but if everything is up in the immediate interface, then nothing is up in the immediate interface (if you don't mind me paraphrasing a common phrase).
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