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Things to remember about the SolidWorks Knowledge Base

The SolidWorks Knowledge Base is a collection of information from many sources that can be searched to find answers to questions or problems. The Knowledge Base is the first place to look for answers to questions about using SolidWorks® software or for solutions to design challenges.

When searching the Knowledge Base, the Knowledge Base will rules and features to help find highly relevant results to a search. The intent is to provide a search solution that is easy-to-use and does not require the use of special search strings or characters. Just enter the question and receive relevant results.

To create better search results the following features are employed:

•  Spell check . The Knowledge Base will automatically correct common spelling mistakes.

•  Proximity searching . This is how the Knowledge Base turns a question into search results. The terms and order of the words within the question are statistically matched to items within the Knowledge Base. This is how the relevance (score) of the search is calculated.

•  Thesaurus . The thesaurus contains a list of plural and possessive terms, long forms of abbreviations, and synonyms. This helps match like terms within search questions to Knowledge Base answers.

•  Advanced options . There are advanced options that can be added to the questions (AND, OR, ? and * wildcards). The most useful option for the type of search used within the Knowledge Base is the use of quotes “”. Quotes will instruct the search of Knowledge Base items to search for results that contain the specific phrase.

For example, to search for instructions on how to use the Knowledge Base, enter, How do I use the “Knowledge Base”? and place quotes around the term being searched for (in this example, “Knowledge Base”). Otherwise, the Knowledge Base will look for either phrase. The use of quotes around specific terms will help focus the search results.

To use the SolidWorks Knowledge Base:

1. Log into the SolidWorks Customer Portal using an email account or serial number with a active Subscription Service contract.
2. Click Search the Knowledge Base within the Self Service section.
   
   
3. Chose a category first. The Advanced Search option will return Solutions and SPRs related to your question.
   
4. Type in your question.
5. Select Search.

The search results are displayed as shown below. To review the details of any of the results click the title link.

When you select a result, the results are displayed as shown below.

Give us your Feedback

There is a Feedback section located on the results page. Please use the survey in the lower left hand corner to share with us your thoughts the following:

• Quality of the solution set?
• Usefulness in terms of resolving the problem?
• Easy to find?

Your feedback will drive improvements to the SolidWorks Knowledge Base. Please take the time to submit your survey when you have completed your search.

Conclusion

The SolidWorks Knowledge Base is the recommended location to pose questions or concerns about using SolidWorks software. This is the same Knowledge Base used by our support engineers; content is added on a frequent basis.