For those of you who have not had the (cough) pleasure (tounge in cheek) of using Pro E- Pro E has a button on the tool bar that toggles the visibility of ALL the planes (and axes, origin points, etc) in a part or assembly. You can't pick which ones you want to see, and which ones you don't (w/o considerable effort), so it can be quite sloppy if you've got a big assembly. SW kind of does the same thing with temporary axes, and origins, but not planes... It's sloppy, but if you want to quickly mate a part by origin planes, it's a lot faster than browsing for the part in the feature tree, expanding it's features, and guessing at what plane it might be (it's always the last one I try, btw...) that you want, over and over again...

BUT- SW has one feature that would totally rock and make this the holy grail- ISOLATE! It would save a ton of time if one could quickly isolate the few parts you are mating, click one button (or better yet, press a shortcut-key on the keyboard) to quickly see ALL the planes in the visible parts, make your mate selections, and turn them off again w/ one storke of the keyboard...

It seems that both Pro E and SW have some great time saving features (I'm horribly addicted to using center click to finish commands as well... ), but totally miss the boat on others. If they would just look at what good w/ their competition and copy it, or better yet, improve on it, we might start getting somewhere...

Another example- the measure tool in SW is leaps and bounds more advanced as well as faster to use than the Pro E measure dialogs (yeah, plural) and saves a lot of time if you are measuring many things in an assembly... Can it be that hard to copy? But that's probably a discussion for the Pro E forums...

BM