What do you all do?

The best way I have found to make revisions is by not changing the filenames, but changing the folder names. Here's an example. If I have a folder (Folder1) and that includes an assembly (Assy1) when I go to make a revision to is, I will create Folder1-Rev1 inside of Folder1. Now BEFORE making assembly changes, copy Assy1 into that folder, but don't change the name of it. Make your revisions to the original files that are still in Folder1 and any parts or drawings that are related will still see the correct files. The old drawings and assemblies, that are now located in Folder1-Rev1 will automatically look at the files located in that folder before it tries the original file path, so as long as you don't have files from Folder1 open, it will always open the files from Folder1-Rev1. If I finsh working on a project and have made three revisions, then my file structure will look like this:

Folder1 Assy1 Part1 Part2 Folder1-Rev1 Assy1 Part1 Part2 Folder1-Rev2 Assy1 Part1 Part2 Folder1-Rev3 Assy1 Part1 Part2

The Assy1 in each folder will always look at the Part1 and Part2 that are also in that folder, AS LONG AS you don't have any of the others currently open.

SW Explorer has a find and replace tool when copying / renaming files. You can replace "Rev 2" with "" to get rid of the extras. In the future, you can replace Rev 2 with Rev 3 to avoid the concatenation.

You can also do a "save as" from within SW. Hit the references button, select all the files, use the replace command to replace ABC with ABCrev1 ect.. That method catches all the SW files, and if you do it from the assembly drawing, it will catch it also. It will not, however, catch any drawings of individual parts or sub-assemblies.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news:1135015743.150474.248930 @g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Good advice. I do a similar thing when I actually need to keep an older REv of the SW files themselves. Instead of folders, I use .zip files. You can't accidentally open a file out of those, and they're smaller.

Thanks Dale, Brian, and cntryfun,

Dale, thanks I didn't know about the find and replace. I'll have to do some reading of the help files. All, I used to do the folder names the way that cntryfun et al do. BUT, I sometimes need to have the current version AS WELL AS the last version open at the same time so that I can use the old one as a referance to make my changes.

Anyway once again (as always) you guys have come through!!! Thanks, Muggs

Just don't add the rev to the original solidworks files only add it to the archive files. That way when you copy a file that does not contain the rev you wont get the concatenation issue. Plus you don't have to worry about assembly pointers or incontext stuff messing up due to a filename change. This is exactly how pdmworks does it -- so if you decide to move to it you wont have to change the process.

For example.

Assembly ABC in the project folder Customer suggests changes use sw explorer to copy ABC to "ABC rev00" into the rev folder make changes to ABC Customer suggests more changes use sw explorer to copy ABC to "ABC rev01" into the rev folder make changes to ABC Customer suggests more changes use sw explorer to copy ABC to "ABC rev02" into the rev folder and so on

Hope that helps Steve T.