How to Copy & Paste SOLIDWORKS Custom Properties between documents

Perhaps you work for a company that makes use of SOLIDWORKS custom properties. Of course you use them, they’re terrific for populating your BOM automatically and can be used for a whole host of other purposes. However, the custom properties that you use at your company are very special — one might almost say…custom.

Let’s say your company always uses four custom properties on your BOM: “Description,” “PartNo,” “Supplier,” and “Material.” However, when you download an air cylinder off of a supplier’s webpage, they do not have the same custom properties. You could populate these manually, but that would be time consuming — especially since you know that they will need all 4 properties, without typos. Did you know you can copy and paste a list of custom properties?

Custom Properties dialog: select the row “1” then hold shift and select row “4”

The Copy & Paste Process

1. First access the custom properties from File > Properties
2. Then, select the list of custom properties from a source file by selecting the row header (where it says “1” on the left), then hold down the Shift key and select the last row (“4” in the example above). You can also use Ctrl+select to select specific properties, just as you would in Windows Explorer or the SOLIDWORKS feature tree, or many other programs.
3. Then give it the old Ctrl+C to copy it.
4. You can then exit the dialog window
5. Open the new file and access the custom properties dialog and
6. Paste the properties (Ctrl+V) into the dialog. Tada! All your custom properties now appear in the new file.

True, they are populated with the same values, some of which may need to be manually changed, but this is far, far, faster than having to recreate the properties manually.