Yes, you’re sitting waiting for a drawing to load again. You look out the pretend window you’ve drawn on the wall with a dull sharpie and sigh as you long to eat at that taco place your grandpa took you to years ago. *Sigh* May as well get some coffee, it’ll only be a few more minutes.

Curses! That guy is in front of the coffee maker… AGAIN. That guy’s going to bare the brunt of our rage today and take a good listening to as we spew forth our misdirected rage. He’ll never mix his imitation creamer there again.

So many times it comes down to waiting and waiting for drawings and models to load. There’s lots of ways to make assemblies and drawings load faster, but there’s gonna be that lag time on occasion. Here’s four seven things, fresh off the top of my head.


Four Seven Functions SolidWorks Should Add When Models are Loading
We’ll have to beat our way past that guy at the coffee machine. He’s just not listening. These are some quick ideas I had. Any ideas?

  1. Start New Drawings
    Why not? It takes a while to take a get drawings set up or re-use existing drawings. Overlay that process with opening files.
  2. Start New Parts
    Same thing pretty much. I could always go for starting new parts while other things are loading or rebuilding.
  3. Change Options
    Not really a big deal, but if you’re starting parts and drawings, you may want to change some document options.
  4. Print Drawing/Model
    What if you needed to or just wanted to. Even better, print without opening.
  5. Find References
    Just another sub-task I could be doing while a model is loading – Getting something together for a Pack-and-go or meeting.
  6. Change Windows View
    You can move a model around, but strangely enough you can not Tile Horizontally, Vertically or Cascade windows.
  7. Select Loaded Parts
    This would be handy for measuring or opening parts to work on while the rest of the model loads.

How much time does model loading really take out of my day?
Really, it depends, but when it does happen, it’s annoying. I tend to try multi-tasking by nature and when I can’t do batches of actions, it’s even more annoying. The real hang-up is when waiting on something totally distracts from getting a goal accomplished. This, however goes with just about everything in life right? accept it? No way. What’s the best way SolidWorks could add some value to those load times?

Images via Flickr [Image1][Image2]

Author

Josh is founder and editor at SolidSmack.com, founder at Aimsift Inc., and co-founder of EvD Media. He is involved in engineering, design, visualization, the technology making it happen, and the content developed around it. He is a SolidWorks Certified Professional and excels at falling awkwardly.