Solidworks Drawing Sheet Format Download

There are 2 ways to use drawings templates and sheet formats in SOLIDWORKS. The first way is the way SOLIDWORKS is setup by default. You select your drawing template and then select a sheet format. The second way is to have a saved template that already contains a sheet format. If you use the default way, then this blog article won't apply to you.

Have you ever tried to change something in your sheet format and when you start a new drawing it is still pulling the old sheet format for additional pages? This will help you eliminate that issue. With drawing files SOLIDWORKS references 2 types of files; Sheet Formats, and Drawing templates. It uses both of these to create your drawings.

Today, I'm going to change an old MCAD drawing to CATI. Here's what we see when we start a new drawing:

We can edit the sheet format so that it says CATI instead of MCAD easy enough:

If we resave our template at this point and start a new drawing, our second sheets will still reference MCAD as we didn't save our sheet format. So the first thing to do is go to File -> Save Sheet Format:

After the sheet format is saved, if we save the drawing template, we'll still find the incorrect sheet format on the second sheet. The reason for this is that while we saved the sheet format, and the template, we never specifically loaded the sheet format for the template to use.

The way to work around this issue is to go into Sheet Properties and reselect your sheet format (or your new sheet format if you saved it to a new name) before saving the template:

In summary, to ensure any changes to your sheet format apply to new sheets in your drawing, do the following:
1) Edit your sheet format to show the new/updated information.
2) Save your sheet format
3) Go into Sheet Properties and select your new/updated sheet format.
4) Re-save your drawing template.

Fred Zobel
Senior Support Engineer
Computer Aided Technology