FYI-

I transferred my presentation from my older home computer to one of our newer work laptops yesterday afternoon to do a run-through of my upcoming SWW presentation.

Though all the hyperlinks worked, about half of the SOLIDWORKS parts were messed up when they opened.  There were either no features at all, or features that were previously good showed errors that would not correct with Ctrl+Q. ICK! **

To get the samples back to what they should be, I had to “reload” each one after they were opened by the ppt hyperlink. ICK! But at least all the reloaded files had everything in them and worked great (even after a skeptical  Ctrl+Q).

I even crashed SOLIDWORKS a couple of times during that run-through.  ICK!

Right before doing a trial presentation at the ChicagoSolidWorks User Group (CSUG) last night I created a “Pre-Loader” assembly, which is a new assembly into which I insert all the parts and assemblies I need live access to in my presentation.  No mates are required – I just dump every sample component into this Asm.  Before I present, I open this Asm in SOLIDWORKS, and then minimize it so everything is tucked away in the background where the audience will never see it.

This is an old trick that I’ve used for more years than I can count to make all of my samples available in the background so they do not need to be individually loaded from the hard drive when clicking hyperlinks during the course of the presentation.  It makes the presentation peppier.

On the extreme PLUS side, last night at CSUG this eliminated ALL the errors and crashes that I ran into on that first run through when I was hyperlinking and loading individual samples!
Whew!

There was no downside.

I just wanted to share the tip in case you are having problems like I initially had, or if you just want your presentation to have a faster response when clicking hyperlinks from your PowerPoint Slides.  If so, consider creating your own “Pre-loader” Asm and opening that Asm before you start your show to make things faster and more stable.  It works GREAT.

All the best,

Ed (just sharing another way to game the system) Eaton

** I don’t know if the problems I encountered earlier in the day were due to a disconnect between SOLIDWORKS 2015 and hyperlinks in PowerPoint 2010.  But I do know that pre-loader Assemblies also make presentations go faster