SolidProfessor Standard
Digital Delivery

Review posted November 19, 2010

There is a relative vacuum of good training materials for SolidWorks, and SolidProfessor takes a stab at filling the void.

Let me provide a little background. I am proficient in AutoDesk Inventor, but recent contracts forced me to learn SW. The books are *really* hard to use, as many of the operations require clicking in specific locations, in specific order. In a short video (as SolidProfessor has done) you can show an operation that would take pages of step-by-steps.

That being said (OK, all you SW devotees, here is your chance to flame), SW is overly picky about the order in which you do things. In Inventor, it was valid to create a sketched feature, then extrude or cut or whatever. In SW this only works sometimes, and the times that it doesn't are positively maddening. I've had to retrain myself to start from the end result (a hole, a cut, a whatever), select that, and then let SW ask me where I want to put it.

If you pay close attention to the videos and do things precisely in the order presented it generally works. Change the order just a little, and more often than not you're hosed and backtracking.

The problem, if there is a problem, is that there are many more details than are described in the videos, and sooner or later you'll hit one. For example I fought long and hard with the "Hole Wizard" in an assembly, trying to transfer hole locations from one part to new holes in another part. The video shows a simple example, but at a critical point, the operator (with no words) does a quick swoop-swoop and instantly the job is done. Huh? What I didn't find out until much later is that he had pressed a shortcut key on the keyboard to bring up a "Create Relation" menu.

I would purchase this again, knowing what I know now, but be prepared for lots of frustration due mostly to the really weird user interface of some common operations in SW.

Like any overly complex product, the veteran (through painful experimentation) learns the short way to get things done.

Maybe SolidProfessor is under contract with SW never to say anything unkind about SW, with its frequently belligerent behavior and strict procedures, but we users have to deal with it all the time. The videos could do a better job in this area.