Two related topics: Renaming Favorites Folders in an Assembly, and comparison with Selection Sets. The recent discussion of Design Binder use has spurred me to elaborate on a similarly little-known or shown Feature Manager tree item.
You can rename Favorites Folders in an assembly. Favorites simply creates a folder which contains representations of chosen components, and keeps it (or them, as you can have multiple ones) at the top of the Tree. I can't say that it reproduces the component, because it only represents it in an additional place. I find it most useful to make a Least Favorite folder which contains all the Erroneous imported components so that I can easily suppress them in a 'CLEAN' subconfiguration. The benefit of my use of a Clean subconfig is that I can work in superassemblies and drawings without being slowed down at every turn by propagated errors in the calculations, then switch config as the last step before rendering a PDF to export the document. It's better to work without erroneous components, but sometimes you have to make do with what works now, particularly after months of invested design and build-up.
Example, with only one erroneous component included:
This is far more useful when there are handful or more such components, but this illustrates re-purposing of Favorites into its opposite.
A very similar feature, Selection Sets, can accomplish the same thing in my case, but it only does one thing: select. (Of course, you can also have multiples of those, and rename them too.) Expanding a component in a Faves folder provides access to its Mates, features, Equations, material, or anything else just like interacting with the component further down in the tree. Does anyone have a useful or compelling preference between Favorites folders or Selection Sets? I'm interested in how different users use these normally hidden resources for their own purposes. (Conjecture:) I can imagine a design with a few configured components which drive broader assembly results, fasteners, and patterns, although the components themselves may be sorted and located variably in disperse nested folders per purpose or process: this would allow more convenient access to the important drivers of the broader assembly, while maintaining a different order below.
SolidworksAssemblies