SolidWorks Tips & Tricks sponsored by AppliedProduction.com

Moving and Copying Features
A great way to increase your productivity is to reuse work that you have already done. SolidWorks makes it very easy to reuse features such as extruded bosses, extruded cuts, holes, and sketches by allowing you to drag and drop features from one place to another. This technique does not work with a lot of the sheet metal features like edge flanges, jogs, hems, tabs, etc, but you can copy and paste the sketches of these features to reuse on another feature.

To move a feature to a new place, hold down the Shift key and drag the feature (either on the model itself or from the FeatureManager design tree) to a different location. Release the cursor to drop the feature on a planar face of the model, as shown in Figure 1. To move more than one feature at a time, hold down Ctrl as you select the features, then hold down Shift while you drag the features.

Figure 1

To create a copy of the feature, hold down the Ctrl key and drag the feature (either on the model itself or from the FeatureManager design tree) to a different location. Release the cursor to drop the feature on a planar face of the model, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

In Figure 3, a feature was copied from one part to another part. To do this, tile the windows using the "Window" pull down menu. Then, hold down the Shift key and drag the feature from one window to another. Note that you can also select the feature or sketch in the FeatureManager design tree and use the Copy (Ctrl+C) and Paste (Ctrl+V) tools on the "Standard" toolbar.

Figure 3

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