- [Instructor] When working with SolidWorks annotations
or dimensions, it's really a good idea
to have an understanding in how you can adjust
and create more leaders to call out your drawings
more cleanly or without as many notations.
So let's start by looking at this note, for example.
Right now I have a leader that exists on it.
And if I click on the note and I go down
to the property manager a little bit,
about halfway down, I see this area
that's specifically for leaders.
So you have many options here.
You can turn them off and have no leader.
You can turn it on.
You can have a multi-jog leader.
You can have a spline leader.
You can have a left or a right.
This is an automatically generated leader, the nearest.
You can also have a straight, bent,
or underlined leader, like I do now.
So if I wanted to change it to straight or bent.
I think most people use this or this for their option.
Now, if we want to create more leaders,
holding down control key on our keyboard,
we're going to hover our cursor over the end point
of this arrowhead, click down with our left mouse button,
click and drag it out.
And you can see now we get this little
plus symbol with a new leader
that we can drag and drop to point to another item.
Now, if you're doing whole call-outs, for example,
at multiple locations or a specific feature
at multiple locations on a view, this can be really handy.
And you can do this more than one time.
So if I go back, hold control,
select this point once and now select again and drag it,
I can create another leader.
And holding down control, I'm just going to repeat that process
by just clicking on the arrowheads and dragging them out.
Now, let's say we've created too many leaders
and we need to reverse that.
I'm going to click on the note,
then come out to the arrowhead and you see
that my cursor changes to have the little point next to it.
I'm going to click one more time.
And now I've singularly selected that arrowhead.
I'm going to hit delete on my keyboard and take that away.
I can repeat that again by just selecting this arrowhead.
You'll notice that only this point is highlighted.
If I select the whole note, everything is highlighted, okay?
So just know the difference
so you're not selecting your notes on accident
and deleting them.
I find it's easiest to select the note first
and then go out and select the end point.
But if you're good at your clicking,
you can come in and just one time tap
and collect that arrowhead, hit delete and delete it out.
So I'm going to just cleaning this back up
to how I originally had.
Another thing that you can do is right click on the note,
expand all of your options.
And if you go down to Annotation,
you can do multi-jog leader.
You can also have this entity snap.
You can convert it into a block.
If you want to copy it,
you can also copy it using copy entities.
Or you can pattern it really quick on the fly.
So you got a few options here.
But the only other thing that we want to look at
for the annotation, if we go back over here,
is what type of arrowhead that we have.
So currently we've got the standard arrowhead.
You can change that to different kinds of symbols,
if you want.
I don't think people usually do that,
but you can adjust that here as well.
And all of this can be controlled
by a style, as well, that you can save.
Now, if we switch over to our dimensions,
those don't have quite as many options for the leaders.
If you switch over to the leader tab on your dimensions,
you do get to adjust a little bit as far as
where your dimensions are, inside or outside of leaders,
things like that.
But that's pretty much all that you're going to mess with
for a straight linear dimension.
When you go over to a cylindrical or radial dimension,
that's when you get some really cool options.
So here we can change this from a radius
to a diameter very quickly.
I know a lot of people have issues with that
when using the smart dimension.
We can also not use a leader like this
but have a linear call-out for this.
And now drag it out.
Our dimension is represented linearly instead.
We can also change if that's vertical or perpendicular
to an axis.
We can also on the fly switch it back to our diameter
and then change if it's one arrow in a solid leader
or one arrow in an open leader on the outside.
We can also add a jog inside of there if we like.
At any particular point, I'm going to right click
on that point and say add jog point.
I can now rotate this dimension around
and make it look a little bit neater.
Same thing with our note over here.
If I click on it and then right click,
I should be able to add a jog point
and I can cause that note to jog as well.
So a lot of adjustability with these leaders
but you really have to look at the property manager
to make sure that you understand your options
when selecting each different item.