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Sheet Index Table


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Is there a way to populate a table for a sheet index that would include the tab name and the sheet description all while keep the sheets in the same order that they appear in the feature manager tree?

 

Our sheet numbering follows the US National CAD Standard, so the alphanumeric ordering won't help ( i.e. G series sheets come before A series sheets). Our order may be something like this:

 

G001 - Cover Sheet

G002 - General Notes

A201 - Orthographic Views

A301 - Sections

A501 - Details

A601 - Door Schedules

E601 - Electrical Diagrams

X501 - Steel Details

Z501 - Shop Use Only

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I am not sure of the answer to this off hand but you can make a drawing template with all your sheets defined and just use that every time you create a new drawing. Using the Insert>Drawing View>predefined you can have each sheet populate with a bunch of standard formatting.

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LOL, I'm trying to get AWAY from doing that manual crap and have it be more automated! :lol:

 

One of my guys here said he had a MACRO that would do it at a former job, but can't remember where they got it from or if it was for a third party software.

 

BTW, I just completed my first production drawing using SolidWorks yesterday. I even had to make my first change to the model today and when it updated the drawings I almost cried.

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Well it would be more automated. You can use solidworks scheduler to create drawing files over night based on the blank templates you setup. Everything from dimensioning, BOM etc. You can also record your own macro but that will require you to do some manual inputs along the way and have some vba knowledge to complete the macro. If your drawing files are nearly identical setting up the blank template will help.

 

If you type in "solidworks macro template" in help you will get some info on creating some stuff.

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  • 6 months later...

I'm doing some thread necromancy here, but I've had more time to work with SolidWorks and I have another idea or two about this.

 

I started playing around with the sheet names and we've used the SW-Sheet Name, SW-Current Sheet and SW-Total Sheets properties to try and name our sheets. Regardless of what the Sheet Name is, SW knows that the sheet has a specific number (i.e. the Current Sheet value). I was thinking that a macro could be written to use the Total Sheets value to create a table with a number of rows that matches this value, and return a specific value based on the Current Sheet values.

 

In AutoCAD, I have one attribute for the sheet number (this is linked to the tab name and will only change when the tab is renamed) and another attribute for the sheet title (this can be changed at any time by double clicking on the text, and is specific to the sheet even though the attribute is the same name). I can use data extraction to pull the values of attributes on all sheets in a drawing and make my sheet index from that. To my understanding, SW doesn't have a sheet specific property and I would have to create a custom property for each sheet that I add, but even then I don't know how to extract those values and update a table without a bunch of manual entry.

 

How are people doing it when they have 100+ sheets in a drawing?

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Do you use the Sheet Set Manager? If not I highly recommend it. If so then you can setup fields to update automatically when a change takes place. It will also insert a Sheet List Table directly from the sheet set manager onto the sheet that has your sheet index with the fields already added so when you update the sheet list in the sheet set manager the sheet index will update dynamically. Sometimes it takes a refresh screen to have it show up or even saving the file will do the same but it is very much worth the time saved when sheets have to be renamed and/or renumbered.

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