As best practice it is advised that the model be made in SOLIDWORKS only. In simple words, one must design a “master CAD model” (part, assembly and drawing with a design intent), so that its changing dimensions and features can be easily captured and can be further used to generate new specifications. It is a free entry level design automation tool that comes with each SOLIDWORKS license. (coming to this a bit later) So, what is DriveWorksXpress? It can be applied to a vast majority of products that are designed in SOLIDWORKS and fall under different industry verticals. Some SOLIDWORKS users might even think they need to write a program, a macro or learn a computer language to be able to automate! Afterall when I first started using SOLIDWORKS I was of the same opinion that design automation is a niche subject best left to the programmers.īut this is where DriveWorksXpress comes into the picture. Or in some cases their design changes completely each time they get a new order and hence have no use of automating their designs. One of the reasons being that they are simply unaware of the free design automation tool inside each SOLIDWORKS license.
![automating solidworks with excel automating solidworks with excel](https://i1.rgstatic.net/publication/342115588_Design_Automation_of_Metal_Scrap_Balers_by_integration_of_SolidWorks_with_Excel_and_VisualBASIC_Language/links/5ee2d859299bf1faac4e66dd/largepreview.png)
There could be multiple reasons for this. How many of them are using SOLIDWORKS to automate their everyday mundane design tasks? The answer simply is “not enough of them”.
#AUTOMATING SOLIDWORKS WITH EXCEL PROFESSIONAL#
A quick search on Google for “SOLIDWORKS users worldwide” throws a figure of ‘six million’, out of which roughly 1 million are professional users.