Well here I am again with another question:
I am implementing design tables to help speed our work and minimize errors. I have the design table looking and working great, however there is one problem. When I started to expand the DT to include tolerances, they do not show up in the model, nor do I see where SW is even seeing them in the DT. SW is not giving any error messages, so I'm sure my parameters are correct. But for the sake of arguement, I am using "$TOLERANCE@TIP DIA@Tool SK" and then I will always use MIN as a tester. I save the DT and close Excel, then return to SW. Nothing happens.
Where am I messing up. My DT columns is well into AA. Could that be the problem. Please help! Pulling my hair out on this one.
I think you're fine, reguarding the number of columns. Excel 2003 can display 256 and Excel 2007 can display 32000+ columns.
Now, I had an error with a design table recently and Solidworks was very subdued about telling me (which is better than that nasty nag box you used to get). Sometimes I got a balloon that would float over the field of drawing next to the task pane saying it couldn't update certain amoung the properties. Other times, it said nothing.
As weird and fickle as design-tables can seem, almost every problem I've had with them has been related to syntax.
What you probably want to do is save out a copy of the design table to a seperate xls file and then start removing columns from the right of your part-resident table until you've isolated the column that throwing the error. Once you've fixed it you can either copy and paste from the external table, or fix the external table, edit the definition of the design table and replace it using the 'from file' option.
Let me know how it works out.