Our current library system can barely be called a library system. Its a mish-mash spaghetti of copies upon copies of the same file in different locations, sometimes with different construction (ugh!). Anyhow, thankfully our assemblies are not overly complicated and there actually is quite a bit of part reuse. What I need is the following:
1. I know modelling and have used PDM before, but not in a SW environment. I just found out about SW Explorer, does anyone have any good online tutorials on how it functions. I plan on pushing hard to implement SW PDM Standard as its included in our license, but we really need to start untangling this mess immediately so that future models aren't built on the same terrible foundation. It sounds like SW Explorer is the best tool for this.
2. It appears that the general idea of past designers was to save an assembly and all its constituents in the file folder associated with that particular job. They also tried to have a semi-organized structure of previous parts for creating new assemblies. As you can imagine, the hidden relations between all of these saved/copies/etc is mind-numbing. We use previous assemblies as the basis for future assemblies and it would be nice not to COMPLETELY destroy old assembly relations, is there a way to have an old assembly open as reference, with a new assembly being modified with possibly the same names?
#2 May sound like a dumb question, but the internal "memory" of SW when I've been cleaning up a model and then it ends up being one saved in a completely different spot than I thought has caught me out a few times. So much, I tend to close down SW and reopen it if I'm working two assemblies with similar part structures. Ugh, this spaghetti mess is frustrating.
Thanks for your input!
Jim
Solidworks cannot handle files with same name.
So first, find all the files with same name and rename them differently.
If they are same part, keep one and delete all the other.
Moving the files to another folder will not work. Solidworks will search every drives and folders it can access.
File open in memory will override file being open.
So the first file open will override all other after it.