- [Instructor] When you're using your SOLIDWORKS drawing
as a controlling document for your designs
in an engineering department or a manufacturing setting,
it's very important to be able to use the revision tables
and update them correctly.
Every time you make an engineering change that's of note,
you'll want to update your current revision table
and the revision block down in the title below.
Most of the time,
companies that you're working for won't use,
you know, SOLIDWORKS PDM or any kind of vault systems,
so you can follow what I do in this example
and it should work out for you.
Now if you are using a vault system
that controls your custom properties in the background,
you'll have to do a little manipulating
or potentially talk to your CAD admin
about how to change your settings
so that you can control where the revision comes from.
In this example, we're talking about revision
as a custom property for a part or an assembly file.
Inside of SOLIDWORKS PDM,
you would instead have the revision as an attribute
that's connected to a workflow,
so it's a very different thing,
so just to be clear.
So in this example, I have a metal bar
that I want to get fabricated.
And right now, we're at rev A
and I have inserted a revision block,
which I can maneuver wherever I like,
just like any other tables.
When I click on it,
you see that I have a few different options here
on the left,
so the first thing we'll notice
is the revision symbol shape.
So even though you're adding notes here
and you might designate a zone
where this note is, you can enable symbols
when adding revisions.
So if I click on new revision on this button below,
I get that little circular symbol,
and I can bring it over to wherever I'm making the change.
So for example,
if I want to change the tolerance on this part,
I can click one time and drop a little B there.
It automatically updates the zone
to show where the change is,
and if I, you know, go down over here
and I say I'm going to update this tolerance, as well,
I can click there, as well
and you'll see up here that the zone has updated.
So that's great, it's a handy little feature
for calling out where the changes are,
so let's go ahead and change that tolerance
like I was talking about.
So I'll update that to zero
and we're going to bring this down to two decimal places
instead of three.
So I'm going to go up here, zoom in.
To fill in the description,
I'm just going to double click on it
like I would any other note tables
and just type in what my change is.
So I changed the dims.
Automatically, the date is inserted.
Over here in the approved,
I'm going to double click again and just put my initials.
Your company or whatever project you're working on
might have a different revision table
or a different way of filling it in.
Every company does things a little bit different,
but this is just using the standard revision table
inside of SOLIDWORKS.
So if I click on this again,
I can go down and just check a few more options
that I think are important.
The one that I like the most,
which came out new in 2019 for a lot of different places
in notation taking and adding notes
is all uppercase,
so if you're like I am,
you like to keep all of your drawings
and engineering documents all in uppercase
so that there's less confusion about lettering and symbols,
you can toggle that on or off right here.
You'll notice I typed in the changed the dims text
without having cap locks on,
but by keeping this clicked on,
it keeps it all nice and capital,
keeps it looking uniform.
Now the one thing that we didn't show yet
is how to insert this.
So right now, if I go up to insert and tables,
revision table isn't there
because I've inserted one already.
So real quick, I'm going to hit Control + Q
to rebuild my document just to update my revision
to show you how that works,
and now I'm going to go up and delete this revision table.
I'm just going to click on it and hit delete.
I'm going to go up to insert, go to tables,
and now I can insert my revision table
and you can see all the same options that were there before.
I just click okay
and it creates it up in the top right hand corner.
I can then click on the next line symbol
and put a couple revision symbols.
Hit next revision again.
You can see I'm just recreating this table
and you can resize it,
and if I hit Control + Q,
the revision is keeping up with it down here.
I'm going to add one more revision
just to show that change one more time,
so now we're at rev C.
I'm just going to drop a symbol over here.
I'm going to zoom in down below, hit Control + Q,
and now you can see we've updated to rev C.
If you're not familiar with Control + Q,
that is a force rebuild
that goes through your entire feature tree
and reloads everything in the document.
If you're ever working with custom properties
in any way, shape or form,
hitting Control + Q instead of the regular rebuild
can help push that metadata through your files.