Our NASWUG RSA meeting took place at the Redstone Arsenal on June 24, 2008 with 17 in attendance. Looks like summer has kicked in fully with schools out now. A few minor hiccups were weathered while waiting for the food to arrive. Pizzas were a little late … something about an oven breaking down, and a cable issue required some scrambling to get Gary Hall’s laptop to display via the projector. Nothing that everyone couldn’t handle though. After the food arrived Ricky Jordan began the meeting with the announcements and general questions. A few people raised their hands in response to “who is participating in the SW2009 Beta test?” SW2009 Beta1 is available to anyone on a current SolidWorks subscription. Someone asked about running SolidWorks on Vista. It turns out that Microsoft has begun to phase out the Windows XP operating system, BUT they have also said they will continue to provide support until 2014. And SW2008 SP4.0 is available at the SolidWorks Customer Portal. Ricky mentioned the newly integrated CircuitWorks which is included for anyone with an Office Premium seat. If you upgrade to SW2008 SP4 (Office Premium seats) you will automatically have CircuitWorks. It is not a separate download. We still need one NASWUG member to complete the NASWUG Advisory Board. AS mentioned at the last meeting, the Advisory board will meet once every two months independently of the NASWUG meetings to discuss meeting topics and ways to improve the User Group.

Gary Hall presented on the subject Templates. The presentation touched on several aspects of Solidworks templates (Dwg, Part, Assy). Templates defaults were covered along with where the files were and could be stored. Answering questions about templates was part of the presentation such as, “Can a design table be stored inside of a SW template”. Doing a multi-sheet drawing template was presented. The difference between a drawing format and a template was covered. Other templates were discussed such as BOM, Hole Table, Rev Table, etc… Lastly, a quick demo of 3Dawn.com’s Template Wizard was discussed. This is a relatively inexpensive tool (discovered at SolidWorks World 2008) that can make creating templates a less painful process. Thanks for a great presentation, Gary.

Concluding the meeting the names of Bhisham Lall, Ledwin Mercury, Drew Riley, Patrick Nickel and Gerald Tuck were drawn for door prizes (to be picked up at next meeting). Again, due to a minor hiccup, the usual enough door prizes for everyone did not arrive on time. The next meeting topic has not been confirmed yet but there were several expressions of interest in a presentation on CircuitWorks. If you have any ideas or requests for topics be sure and forward them to ricky@naswug.com