Complete newbie

Greg,

You need to get used to using dimensions. The property manager is for other things, and is best turned off for new users (in my opinion anyway). Use some construction lines (vertical or horizontal) constrained to the origin if your first line is angled. Or, just rough sketch the whole profile and constrain/dimension to suit

In Autocad, the geometry drives the dimension. In Solidworks it's the other way around. Like someone else here said, "in autocad you draw something, and dimension it to tell you what you did" "In Solidworks you dimension to tell the geometry what you want it to do". This is a very basic concept you must grasp to learn Solidworks.

Regards

Mark

I would really recommend you take the tutorial book and literally go through the examples from first to the last page, and it will give you a very good overview of all the basic functions and how they work.

As basic as those first simple parts are, they drill you in all the most common basics so your mind gets tuned to the way SolidWorks "does it".

Bo

Thank you both, I was afraid that the problem that I was having was my thinking process (confirmed). I am trying to model a part that was drawn by someone in AutoCAD with bad geometry (open profiles). I have been sketching and trimming radii and lines to generate a cam profile, and have been adding tangent relations and center points along the way, but have been struggling because of the problems with the original drawing of the part that I am trying to model. I have modeled a few simple parts, and have used dimensions to drive the geometry of some parts. As I was trying to change the angle of one of the lines in my cam, it was driving a change in a radius that I want to maintain. I obviously didn't have the radius constrained well enough to prevent this. I will try to add the whole profile to my sketch, and then to start to add relations to the parts that I know I want to maintain and see what has to change to correct the open profile that I started with.

Thank you again for the time you took to respond.

Greg

I was in the same situation as you in that I had an Autocad backround when I started to use Solidworks. I found the best thing to do with my Autocad knowledge, was to completely forget it. Like someone mentioned in a earlier post, go completely thru the online help tutorial. Another recent item available is the Solidowrks for Dummies book by Greg Jankowski. I got a copy for attending the Western Users Conferance, and I must admit that even with about 6 years of use under my belt, I picked up a few things from his book!! Another great resourse available are the local user groups. Im not sure where you live, but if you check out

you can search for a local group. These meetings can provide you with tons of information, and each meeting usually has a solidworks how-to session. Biggest advice I can give you, dont give up. At my former company I went from being a Solidworks newbie, to the guy everyone went to with their questions. Good luck!