SolidWorks 2006 Office Premium has over 200 customer driven enhancements that make transitioning to 3D easier and faster than ever.  The new performance enhancements and innovations bring productivity to a new level for all SolidWorks customers.

Transitioning to 3D

The SolidWorks DWGseries of products help working with DWG data easier than ever.  The three products that make up the DWGseries include: DWGgateway, DWGviewer, and DWGeditor.  DWGgateway is a free plug-in for AutoCAD® that enables users to read and write any version of DWG files.  This product is available free for anyone to download at www.dwggateway.com.  The DWGviewer is our eDrawings product.  eDrawings is an amazing product that can also view and print any version of DWG files.  eDrawings is a free product for anyone to download at www.edrawingsviewer.com.  DWGeditor is a product for SolidWorks customers that enables them to work with native DWG files using a familiar interface without translation.  DWGeditor uses the native DWG file format making editing legacy DWG files seamless. (Click here for a short video on DWGgateway.)

Smart Components make designing faster and intuitive

SolidWorks users can now create and re-use Smart Components in any design.  Smart Components can be dragged and dropped into any assembly from any 3D model content library.  These components will automatically size themselves for the task, orient and locate themsleves into an assembly correctly.  Also, Smart Components automatically create any mounting features such as hole patterns in any existing mating parts as well as automatically supply the mounting hardware such as bolts, washers, and nuts.  Smart Components will provide tremendous time savings as well as reduce the amount of errors. (Click here for a short video.)

The new SolidWorks Design Checker can make sure designs are complete reducing the amount of change orders

The Design Checker is a new product included with SolidWorks Office Professional and SolidWorks Office Premium that enables users to make sure SolidWorks designs adhere to company standards.  The SolidWorks Design Checker can alert users to overlapping dimensions, title block omissions, incomplete material specification, or even violations of dimensioning standards. 

New sketch blocks enable 2D mechanism design.  SolidWorks users can now quickly layout mechanisms in 2D.  These layouts can be manipulated dynamically to make sure of fit and function before committing to creating 3D assemblies.  Using blocks in layout sketches allows users to design complex mechanisms in 2D sketches and automatically convert these sketches to 3D components without the need to start from scratch. (Click here for a short video.)

Time-saving Innovations

SolidWorks 2006 makes working with large assemblies easier than ever before

SolidWorks 2006 has unparalleled performance for designing large assemblies with tens of thousands of parts. Many of the top user commands have been optimized to run faster.  Lightweight mode has been rearchitected so that most assembly and drawing tasks can be done while in lightweight mode.  Drawings now can calculate views in the background while you annotate developed views.

Design validation is now easier than ever.  This opens the door for every engineer and designer to have insight into design performance before physical prototypes are produced.

The results from Physical Simulation (functionality to enable component motion) can now be used to automatically set up the loads and boundary conditions for each part in an assembly for a COSMOSXpress analysis.

The 3D sketch has been enhanced for creation of rectangles, circles, arcs and reference planes in a single 3D sketch.  Entities can be dimensions.  With the enhancements to the 3D sketcher for 2006, SolidWorks is providing the capability to create more designs with less reliance on 2D sketch geometry, thereby creating both planar and non-planar geometry in a single sketch feature. This will significantly cut down on the amount of sketch features necessary to create more complex shapes, while increasing the reliability of the associativity between sketch entities. One of the first features where this new capability is apparent is the Loft feature. If the Loft feature is defined using a 3D sketch, the user can actually modify the sketch by dragging portions of it while creating or redefining the Loft feature.

SolidWorks 2006 has new innovations to make production level drawings fast and easy.  New innovative functionality includes a new spell checker, a new table generator, and 3D interactive drawings views.  3D Interactive drawing views enable any user to rotate any 2D drawing view so that the whole model can be viewed in its 3D state.  This makes selecting edges and dimensioning extremely easy for even the most complex components.  The power of 3D visualization is now readily available in the 2D detailing environment.

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