Z-up doesn’t truly work as it should.  It rotates a view causing  your vertical lines to be horizontal and visa versa.  The catch is when you say “Normal To” it rotates that plane rather then keep it in the same relationship to “Z” up.   ( Pretty much same as before.)  

Try  your normal “Y” up and draw on both the right and front views when in the Isometric View.  If it rotates you “Normal To” go back to Isometric view and draw in your right and front views.  You will see that in all of  your views vertical lines run parallel to “Y”.  Nothing ever gets rotated when you say, “Normal To”.

Now do the same thing in “Z” up and draw on both the right and front view when in the Isometric view.  If it rotates you “Normal To” go back to iso view and draw in you’re your right and front views.  You will see that in one of your views the vertical lines no longer  run parallel to “Z” .  You will see that one plane gets rotated and the other plane stays the correct way.  This causes your vertical lines to now become horizontal and visa versa……… BUT……… when you say “Normal To” you will watch one of your views get rotated.

What we would like it to do is basically if you were to draw everything in ISO view, all lines running vertically would be drawn vertically just like it does with “Y” up.   Actually we do a lot of drawing in Isometric View no matter what plane we are drawing on.

we can work around it, but kind of annoying when Gibbs, Esprit, Keycreator, are all Z-up along with all our EDM’s and Vertical machining centers all using  “Z”-up.

I just looked and we currenty have 57,000 folders (not files) of Keycreator, Exprit, and Gibbs folders.  Each folder has at least a Cad file and some machining opp so that is a lot of files all “Z”up……. SIGH………

Basically on all of our older files I am rotating them to “Y”up and then the machining departments are rotating it back to “Z”up. I am sure there are several other machine shops with the same issue as us.

So anyways, if you come up with some fix let me know.  I’m not even sure why Solidworks included this with 2020 and it doesn’t do what people wanted it to do.  ……Maybe they didn't realize the real issue?......Perhaps maybe they just wanted to be different.... LoL…….. Maybe I don’t know what I am talking about………. :-) …….