The first Night School of 2015 is right around the corner! Following up on my colleague’s preview blog, there have been some questions about whether or not you’d benefit from attending.
I’m personally a questions guy myself, and I find most engineers are the same way. With that said, these next few questions (and answers) should give you more of an in-depth look of what this Night School will be all about!

See if any of these scenarios are familiar or apply to you:
Hey, I’m barely starting up on SOLIDWORKS – should I attend or is too advanced?
Yes, you should attend! You’ll get a wealth of information and a good overview of what you can do with assemblies in SOLIDWORKS, as well as an opportunity to network and see how others in the industry are working with assemblies in their design process. If you find that there’s so much material and you didn't get it all the first time, we’ll be hosting an online session too!
I usually get assemblies that are already put together – how would this Assembly Techniques Night School benefit me?
Whether it’s Bottom-Up (building our parts and then relating them with one another in an assembly) or Top-Down design (starting from the assembly level and creating our components), you’ll be more flexible (no pun intended) working with engineers when they give you an assembly or just a folder full of parts! You’ll have a better idea of what techniques they used and what their design intent was, allowing you to streamline the overall design process without having to go back and forth with the engineers or vendor.
You've found yourself thinking, "There has got to be an easier way to center a component without fumbling with calculations and setting up a bunch of distance mates."
We’ll take a look at the Width Mate, and its new enhancements that allow you to define its range of movement: Centered, Free, Dimension, or by Percentage. We’ll touch on the new Profile Center Mate too!
You’ve finished an assembly and have to send it to someone outside of the company…and all of your parts in separate folders. What now? Do you painstakingly comb through each folder and put everything in one folder to .zip over to them?
We’ll take a look at how you can easily find references for an assembly, even replace missing references, and how to easily grab all of the parts and sub-assemblies you need, using our Pack-N-Go feature!
As a manger, you’re just trying to take a look at the progress of a large assembly (1000+ components) and maybe just take a few snapshots… but it’s taking forever to load.
We’ll talk about Large Design Review so you can pop open the assembly, rotate and inspect the model, and grab a few snapshots without having to wait for every single part to rebuild.
What if you know everything?
We’ll probably just have you come up on stage! All joking aside, maybe you’ll find that one little keyboard shortcut or tool that you didn't know existed, like the Collapse the FeatureTree shortcut (ESPECIALLY if you have a large assembly) or Select Other.
If you know all of this stuff, great! Our suggestion? Bring a colleague along with you so they can learn more while you enjoy some free food and networking time with other SOLIDWORKS users – and your local Hawk Ridge team.
As you can see, we’ll cover a wide range of topics ranging from the basics to more advanced topics, and tips and tricks in between – there will be something for everyone!
See you at Night School!
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