"Before we were kind of limited on how we could design, because we had to design through the component to the other side," says McDonnell. "Now we can design multiple areas and connect them later."

Drawings take center stage
Even in a 3D world, the need for 2D drawings never ends. "As much as I hate to say it," says Chuck Marshall, Mechanical Design Supervisor at Lytron Inc. (Woburn, MA), "you still need those drawings to make the parts." With a host of new drawing enhancements, SolidWorks 2003 has further refined its 2D design capabilities.

Automatic centerlines and centermarks creation is one new feature that really stands out for Lytron, which relies on 2D drawings to manufacture its heat exchange systems. The new feature automatically inserts center marks or centerlines into drawings, so users don't have to draw them in by hand, a process that traditionally consumed a lot of time. "We do a lot of tubes that are bent in funny configurations," says Marshall, "and centerlines are big for us, because that's how a person sets up their tooling to bend these straight tubes into the shape we need."

Other enhancements in SolidWorks 2003 aim to ease the 2D to 3D transition, especially for AutoCAD® users. A new help documentation maps AutoCAD to SolidWorks commands so users can learn as they go. If an external reference or document related to AutoCAD blocks (groups of entities in AutoCAD that can be reused) is updated, the block inside a completely different SolidWorks file will update as well. What's more, proxy entities, such as 2D bolts and washers, created in AutoCAD Mechanical can be imported into SolidWorks as part of the AutoCAD file.

Improvements in eDrawings
eDrawings (a free download available to anyone on the SolidWorks website) allows even non-SolidWorks users to view SolidWorks files. New with SolidWorks 2003, eDrawings can now open DWG and DXF™ files. Quick help tags instruct eDrawings recipients on how to open and use an eDrawings file.

And in eDrawings Professional "(a paid-for version of eDrawings included in SolidWorks Office Professional and SolidWorks Office, that includes added markup and visualization capabilities), exploded views can now be animated to show how the parts of an assembly fit together. In addition, parts can be made transparent or they can be hidden in order to isolate a component of interest or hide proprietary design information.

"The biggest release ever," is how Aaron Kelly, Product Development Manager at SolidWorks, sums up SolidWorks 2003.

"Overall, I love it, and can't wait to put my group on it," says Lytron's Chuck Marshall. "There's just a lot of those little tools that people may take for granted, especially on the 2D end." With comments like these, it's hard not to consider moving on up to the latest release of SolidWorks.