SOLIDWORKS Standard Solutions Include:

One of the most important considerations in evaluating a 3D CAD system is how quickly new users can get up-to-speed and begin doing productive work. Extra time means extra cost, which cuts into your profit.
With SOLIDWORKS, users learn fast, and work fast. Our extensive feature set, intuitive, easy-to-use design experience, and broad range of customization options saves design time on every project. And whether you design every day or only occasionally, that means better productivity as your 3D CAD tools work for you — not against you.
 
SOLIDWORKS worldwide community brings passion and knowledge to design. When questions arise, you’ll have quick access to people and resources to gain the knowledge and support you need.

Save time and development costs, avoid redesigns, and increase productivity by continuously checking your designs against cost targets with automated manufacturing cost estimation tools fully integrated with SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD software.
Handle all aspects of your part and assembly modeling with SOLIDWORKS 3D design system. Effective product design involves a wide range of tasks that demand flexibility in your software. 3D solid modeling offers several advantages over traditional 2D design, but you want 3D CAD tools that you can use every day while being powerful enough to handle all the aspects of your design process.
 
With SOLIDWORKS, you get an intuitive 3D CAD system that combines ease-of-use with powerful modeling capabilities that can handle your most complex design projects. SOLIDWORKS accelerates your design, saving time and development costs, and making you more productive.

Use SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD to quickly create production-ready 2D drawings that are always current, and clearly communicate how your design should be manufactured and assembled. SOLIDWORKS associativity links a 2D drawing directly with a 3D solid model, so updates to the 3D model can be automatically reflected in the 2D drawing. SOLIDWORKS accelerates your design process, saving time and development costs while increasing productivity.
 
With traditional 2D CAD, drawings are often out of date and/or drawing views do not accurately reflect the design, leading to expensive manufacturing errors that slow down product delivery. Without an automated update system, all drawing views must be updated manually whenever a design change occurs. This becomes an even bigger problem when a component or assembly exists in many different assemblies or at many different levels of the same assembly, because it requires that all the drawing views containing the modified components be updated.
 
SOLIDWORKS drawing capabilities include:

• Automatic Drawing View creation and update— Drag and drop the 3D model onto a drawing for automatic generation of drawing views with automatic update of changes to the 3D model
• CAD Dimensioning, Tolerancing and Annotations— SOLIDWORKS includes standard ANSI, ISO, GD&T, and other dimensioning methodss
• Bill of Materials (BOM)— Automatically generate parts lists and cut lists to track material needs
• CAD Standards checking (Design Checker)— Compare your drawings to company standards to ensure consistency using the SOLIDWORKS Design Checker tool
• Revision control— Control drawing revisions and graphically compare drawings to identify differences
• Automated Creation of Radial/Cylindrical Exploded Views – Significantly speed up the creation of exploded views for designs that have fasteners and components positioned radially/cylindrically around an axis

Quickly and easily leverage existing engineering data to create new designs and speed up new product development using SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD software. With SOLIDWORKS, a range of tools helps you reuse existing 3DCAD models and 2D drawings, which accelerates your design process, saves time and development costs, and increases productivity.

New products are often variations of existing products, with current designs tweaked or reconfigured to meet a new customer’s need or requirement. At other times, major sections of one or several designs need to be reused in other designs.
SOLIDWORKS search, automation, and configuration tools simplify the reuse of existing design data to create new designs. Designers and engineers can find and configure design data and documentation quickly to create new designs, which reduces product development time so they can put their focus on developing innovative new products rather than manipulating a CAD system.
 
SOLIDWORKS design reuse and automation tools include:

• CAD Search—Find items quickly in complex designs
• Design automation—Streamline creation of similar parts
• Bill of Materials (BOM)— Automatically generate parts lists and cut lists to track material needs
• Parts and Assembly Configuration— Generate simple, complex, or similar versions of your design

Quickly and easily create powerful images and animations of your design from the 3D model with SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD software to more easily communicate your design intent and product functionality. SOLIDWORKS rendering and animation tools increase productivity, save time, and accelerate your time-to-market.

Moving from 2D to a 3D CAD system improves how your ideas and concepts are communicated inside and outside your company. It’s simply easier to understand a design when you see it in 3D, as opposed to a static 2D drawing. Potential customers and internal company decision makers want a virtual experience with a design that is as close to the “real life” experience as possible.
 
People want to see the design in action, moving and performing the tasks it is designed to do. They want to see the 3D model as they would the real life product, with its specific colors and materials—even the environment or setting of their choosing, be it sitting on a picnic table on a sunny day or on a coffee table in a lamp-lit living room. They also want to interact with, maneuver around, and even go through the design to gain perspectives impossible to capture in 2D.
 
The ability to experience the design as it would be in “real-life” helps win more business by providing a more engaging way to present proposals. It helps guide critical internal decisions earlier in the design phase, without a need for building costly physical prototypes. And it’s a faster, more cost-effective way to get feedback and confirmation from potential customers and buyers, ensuring you are making the right product decisions.
 
SOLIDWORKS visualization capabilities enable you to quickly and easily create powerful images and animations to clearly communicate your design intent:

• PhotoView 360— Create life-like photorealistic images and animations quickly, without being a graphics expert
• Walk-through/Fly-through— Take a virtual tour of your design or record a video to help explain it to others
• CAD Animation—Demonstrate your design’s basic operation by applying motion, gravity, and component contact or by manually moving components. Then, record and save a video

Share your designs, manage design files, and work closely with your team and other stakeholders while protecting proprietary data with the multiple tools and applications in SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD software, saving time and development costs, increasing productivity, and accelerating time-to-market.

SOLIDWORKS product collaboration tools help members of your design team work closely with other project stakeholders. SOLIDWORKS software also provides ways to protect your designs before sharing them beyond your organization and to manage project data and control design revisions. 
SOLIDWORKS product collaboration tools include:

• Large Design Review—Quickly open, navigate, walk-through, measure, section, and create snapshot views with comments of massive assemblies to clearly communicate the design to your team
• eDrawings® file viewing— Review 2D drawing and 3D model data together using compact, email-friendly file viewing that supports SOLIDWORKS, DWG™, and numerous other CAD formats
• Defeature: Protect your intellectual property —Use SOLIDWORKS Defeature technology to hide selected aspects of your design before sharing models
• SOLIDWORKS file management —Use PDM Standard to manage project data with secure file vaulting, automated revision control, and user/group access control. For more advanced PDM capabilities (like multiple sites, product release workflow control, and access by large numbers of users), ask about SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM .
• Import/Export Over 30 CAD Formats – SOLIDWORKS provides more than 30 translators to convert incoming CAD data into SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD format or to export SOLIDWORKS data to other CAD products.
• 3D Models for CAD/CAM Integration with CAM Partners – Certified CAM partners provide seamlessly integrated CAM for SOLIDWORKS so you can eliminate data translation and maintain associativity between SOLIDWORKS and your favorite CAM system.
• 3D Dimensioning and Tolerancing – Dimension, tolerance, and detail your models in 3D if you are looking to eliminate the need for 2D drawings.
• 2D DXF®/DWG® Data – Import and export 2D DXF®/DWG® data in order to reuse and maintain 2D designs, as well as export to manufacturing.
• Maintain and Update Existing 2D Drawings – edit and view DWG® files in DraftSight®
• 2D to 3D CAD Conversion Tools – Use your existing 2D design data to help create new designs in SOLIDWORKS 3D
• Convert 3D Solid Parts to Sheet Metal – Export 2D DXF®/DWG® data directly from 3D solid and sheet metal parts
• Print Directly to 3D printers: 3MF and AMF Formats – Print directly to 3D printers, similar to how you would print a document to your office printer
• MCAD to AEC: Prep and export to AEC applications – Quickly prepare a SOLIDWORKS model for import into AEC applications

Verify that your parts and assemblies will fit, assemble, and operate correctly with SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD software before going into production. Fully integrated with CAD, you can use Interference Check while you design to accelerate your product development process, save time and development costs, and increase productivity.

Component interference, misaligned and mismatched holes and fasteners, and incorrect tolerancing of manufactured parts are the main causes of high rework and scrap costs on the assembly floor. When using only a 2D CAD tool, it is very difficult to uncover these issues before going into manufacturing.
 
SOLIDWORKS tools help you verify your designs will fit, assemble, and operate correctly before you make any parts. Interference checking finds issues early in design, giving you more time to make less costly fixes.
 
SOLIDWORKS interference checking capabilities include:

• 2D and 3D Collision detection— Check that all your parts fit and can move as intended before building any prototypes
• Hole misalignment and thread mismatch checks— Ensure that all mating parts, mounting holes, and fasteners align and that threads match in assembly design
• Tolerance analysis—Assess manufacturability beginning with dimensions and tolerances long before getting to production

SOLIDWORKS SimulationXpress is a first-pass analysis tool that comes with every SOLIDWORKS Standard and Professional software packages, giving you the ability to do basic stress analysis on individual parts. You can quickly determine effects of force and pressure, and generate reports to document results. When you are ready to test full assemblies, it is easy to upgrade to advanced SOLIDWORKS Simulation packages.

Check your design and verify manufacturability of your product early in the development process using SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD, saving time and development costs, improving productivity, and accelerating your time-to-market.

To ensure your product can be manufactured, SOLIDWORKS provides 3D tools to review your design early in the development process. It is much easier and less costly to correct issues found during the design stage than correcting them during manufacturing planning, or after your design is in production.
 
SOLIDWORKS capabilities to check for manufacturability include:

• DFMXpress —Compare your design to standardized manufacturing rules to assess if your design can be produced
• Compare parts and drawings for changes —Automatically compare designs to instantly understand differences
• CAD Check for Parts and Tooling — Quickly understand if your parts can be easily removed from mold, cast, or form tooling
• Sheet metal bending and flat pattern — Easily assess if your sheet metal parts can be developed from flat stock