Drawing notes using design library

SolidWorks Design Library, you can save and reuse frequently-used notes (and other annotations). Then you can just drag-and-drop your way to creating that “NOTES:” block of manufacturing instructions that lives on just about every drawing. Leave the typing to the monkeys!

Here’s how: First, you’ll need to verify a setting in SolidWorks. Go to Tools > Options > System > Drawings, and make sure you uncheck “Disable note merging when dragging”. Now, you can practice this with any two note annotations on a SolidWorks Drawing. Just drag and drop one Note onto another and you’ll see it appends the dropped note to the end of the Note you dropped it on! It’s more fun when you make use of the Design Library. Right-click on your favourite note and choose Add to Library. You’ll be automatically pointed to the default file location for your Design Library notes folder, and you can choose a file name to save as. Now, open up your Design Library from the Task Pane (on the right), and start drag-dropping onto your Drawing. You might want to get a note started manually by typing “NOTES:” and a line break, and clicking the numbered list icon on the formatting bar. Then drag a note favourite out of your Task Pane and onto the existing note. Take that, monkeys! It also works nicely with a multi-line note. For example, if there are four things you need to tell people when they nickel plate a part, you can save them all into one library item and drag-drop it in together. Like this: Not only is that much faster, it’s much more reliable too. And less messy.