- [Instructor] Anytime that you're working in 2D geometry
inside of a SOLIDWORKS drawing,
especially when you're trying to do a 2D layout
or some kind of floor plan, maybe a schematic,
you're going to want to take advantage of blocks.
Now, a lot of people think of blocks
as AutoCAD or 2D technology
but SOLIDWORKS has all the same functionality
inside of its drawings
and inside of its sketches
to leverage the block functionality.
Now, in your Annotation tab in the Command Manager,
you will see Blocks right here
and if you click on the block commands,
there's only Make Block and Insert Block.
What I suggest that you do
is right click on the Command Manager.
If you're using 2020 or earlier,
you'll see this Toolbars menu.
If not, the toolbars will just pop up.
And go down and activate the Blocks toolbar.
That'll give you the whole toolbar here
to work with as we manipulate
and create our blocks.
Creating a block is pretty easy.
I'm just going to create some generate sketch geometry.
Let's say I'm doing a layout of an office.
So let's do the whole perimeter of the office
and let's say that this is about the size of a desk.
So I'm going to put a little note in here that says desk
with this little square.
And maybe I also want to include a little filing cabinet
next to it that's about this big, okay?
If I want to treat this as one unit
that I can drag and drop all over this,
I'm just going to select all the items,
go over to my Block menu and click Make Block.
This now switches the Property Manager
to the Make Block Property Manager.
You see that all of my block entities are in there.
If I want to go a step further,
I can also change the insertion point.
If I want to make more copies of this block in the future,
this is the point in which I can control and drop them.
Right now, it's this bottom left-hand corner.
I think that's fine, so I'm going to leave it as is
and click OK.
Now that I've created a block,
I have a few other options up here.
I can edit the block.
I can insert a new block.
I can save this block or I can explode this block,
which essentially undoes the block functionality
and turns the entities back
into their original sketch entities or annotations.
So right now, if I click on the block,
over in my Property Manager,
I also see existing relations.
You can add relationships to blocks
just like any other sketch entities.
I can edit the block by hitting Edit.
It brings up the block edit interface
and when I'm ready to leave that,
I just click on the exit block icon.
If I click on it again and go down,
I can do things like scale it.
So if I want to make it twice the size,
I can simply scale it right here.
I can also rotate it around.
You can see how really quickly this becomes really handy
when working on layouts.
So I can very quickly also while I have this selected,
Control + C, Control + V to copy and paste
and drop various desks around this office
that I'm trying to lay out.
What's also nice is that when I want to edit it,
I can double click on it
and it says yes, do you want to edit it?
Yes.
I can go in here and change one item.
So let's call this Desk 1.
And when I exit it, it updates all the other blocks as well.
Now, in future videos,
I'm going to be instructing you
on how to create a block library
but to do that, you have to save a block.
So to save a block,
you can go up to your blocks in the feature tree here.
Select Block1, right click and say Save Block
and then find a location that makes sense for you.
So I'm going to save this in the files for this course.
It's going to save it as a SOLIDWORKS block.
And then if I want to reuse this,
I can just open it or make it a part
of a library over here
that I can just drag and drop it onto my screen.
Now, if I don't want to have this be a block anymore,
I can click on it and say Explode Block
and now this is back to being its separate sketch entities.
Pretty simple.
I usually like to hit Control + Q a few times along the way
to make sure that all of my blocks are rebuilt.