What makes SOLIDWORKS such a powerful application is the sheer breadth of tools and utilities it offers designers. It would seem that the only limitation to what can be created in SOLIDWORKS is our imagination. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we share with you one of the little-known utilities found in SOLIDWORKS: the DrawCompare tool. This utility offers the functionality to compare many different compare tools that inspect your documents for differences and present you with an easy to follow report outlining any changes

How To Use the DrawCompare Tool

The DrawCompare utility can be used to compare: documents, features, geometry, BOMs and 3D PMI.

• Documents: Compares the properties of two SOLIDWORKS documents (or two configurations of the same document). This utility identifies file properties, document-specific properties, and document properties.
• Features: Identifies the differences in solid features, including appearance properties (colors, optics, and textures) between two versions of the same part (or two configurations of the same part). Features are compared by name and type and are classified into three different categories- identical features, modified features, and unique features.
• Geometry: Compares two parts (or two configurations of the same part) and identifies differences between two versions of the same part. Compare Geometry performs both volume comparison and face comparison. For assemblies, you can compare geometry only in volumes, and for surface models, you can compare geometry only in faces.
• BOMs: Compares Bill of Material (BOM) tables from two SOLIDWORKS assembly or drawing documents. You can compare BOM tables from two assemblies, two drawings, or an assembly and a drawing.

As you can see, the DrawCompare tool is a real time saver when you need to see what’s different between models or files.

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