From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

Using design tables - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

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Using design tables

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- By using design tables inside of SOLIDWORKS, we have all the power of Microsoft Excel linked to our SOLIDWORKS files. We can individually tie dimensions to cells inside of an Excel spreadsheet, and then drive that part from those cells. It's a pretty powerful thing and it's great for creating families of parts. Let's go ahead and dive in to using design tables in SOLIDWORKS. SOLIDWORKS gives you the ability to use Microsoft Excel to drive your part configurations. We can create a link between an Excel file and our part here, and then any values I type in there will automatically show up here to drive this component. To do that, we need to come up here and say, Insert, and then come down here to Tables, and then come over here to Design Table, click on that. And notice we have the Auto Create option which we use most of the time. Go ahead and click on OK. And what that's going to do, it's going to search the part itself, and it's going to find all the available dimensions or sketches that we can use to bring in to define our part. So I can choose one, two, or all of these, it doesn't really matter. And if you had a hundred different things in your part, you would bring them all in so you can choose how you want to drive this component. Now if you go ahead and choose all these, click OK, it'll bring those values into our current Design Table. Now notice up here at the top of the screen, we are no longer in SOLIDWORKS, we are in Excel, right? We're a full version of Excel here that's opened up on top of our SOLIDWORKS environment. And as long as I stay in this little window here, if I don't click anywhere else out here, I can modify and change around this table. The only problem here though is I don't really know what D1@Sketch1 is. I don't know what D2@Sketch2 and so on, is. So it'll be better if I went back to my SOLIDWORKS environment, and I changed the names of those sketches. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to go ahead and click back over to SOLIDWORKS. And I do want to point out though, that I created a Table. Here's my Table and that Design Table's right there. I don't want to use that one. So I'm going to right click on it, and I'm going to say Delete. Come back over here to my design. Now right over here inside of Boss-Extrude1, there is the underlying sketch, and like, open that sketch, notice I have this value here six. And over here under Primary Value, Notice it says D1@SKETCH1. Well, instead of that, let's just say like, something like L, super simple like just L, okay? And over here, let's click on this one here and instead of D2@SKETCH1, let's type in H for like height. Pretty straight forward. So if I click over here it'll be L@SKETCH1, and over here it'll be H@SKETCH1, okay? Now, I can also change the name of the sketch. So let's exit out of that sketch. And this is going to be my sketch. So I can click on that and change the name of that as well. So I'm going to call this one like, BASE SKETCH, okay? And then as far as my feature, I can rename that as well. All right, so this is going to be BLOCK is fine. All right, so now I've named the feature, I've named the sketch and I've named the actual dimensions inside of my park. Now when I go back to create the Design Table, all that will show up. So go up here to Insert, come down here to Tables, come over here to Design Table, and click on the Auto create option. And now we get L@BASE SKETCH, H@BASE SKETCH, and D1@BLOCK. Now we can and have the options of bringing one or multiple items in here. I'm going to go ahead and bring all of them in, and click on OK, all right? Now what I can do is I can create multiple configurations. So the main thing I need to do is change the name. I already have a default, so I have to change it to something else. So I'm going to call this one like, NEW1. And I can put any values I want in here as long as they're numbers. So let's type in like, eight by six by two. And then create another version, I just want to call this one NEW2. It does have to be different. This time I'm going to type in one by 12 by six. So whatever values you want to put in here, it doesn't matter. We have the full version of Excel opened up here. So anything you want to use as far as like, equals, or equations, or drive it with some type of a look up value, we can do that in these cells, as long as it equates back to a number, we should be all set. In fact, if you skip a column or a row, anything you do over here or down here will be ignored by SOLIDWORKS. So if you want to do some extra calculations or figure something else out, you can do that over there and then have it equate over to whatever you're doing in these three columns. Now this is a pretty simple example. You can literally have hundreds of values driven by a table. They will modify your part in many different ways. But once you have these couple new configurations, go ahead and click anywhere outside of the table, that'll bring you back over here to SOLIDWORKS. It's going to let you know you've got a couple new configurations, click on OK. And if I go over here to the Configuration manager, notice I have that Default Configuration here. And if I click over to NEW1, notice the part automatically adjusts. NEW2, same thing. I can adjust that part to whatever shape I want by going here and clicking on the Configurations, it'll just switch between the different sizes. If you want to modify the table, click under Tables, click on the table itself, right click and say Edit Table, that will take us back into the table, and then we can add even more configurations. Notice it's also bringing in these things like color or description or pattern. You can bring this in if you want to, but I'm not going to, so just click OK. And now we're back to where we were. You can add more configurations. You can change the values, whatever you want. We can do it all over here. I'm going to go ahead and make just one more just for fun. I'll call this one NEW3, and make that one 12 by 12 by 12. Okay, click out of there, back over to our SOLIDWORKS environment and tells us we have that new configuration. And if I click on it, I got that big old block. There it is. Okay, so you can see that the design table is very powerful. We can use it to control all kinds of different things inside of SOLIDWORKS. So far I've only driven actual dimensions, but you can also change things like color, descriptions and so on, and all kind of other things that are all related to this part can all be driven inside of that table.

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