Hello wise ones,

I am a very new Solidworks 2010 user, so please bear with me.

I need to create a part which represents a piece of sheet metal with simple round holes drilled at various (x,y) locations. All the holes have the same diameter, but their locations are quasirandom. There are about 60,000 holes total, and they are nonoverlapping.

I can create a list of (x,y) pairs, each representing the center of a hole, but my question is how do I make a sketch from these x,y pairs?

I have tried Sketch Picture and then a Trace of a Bitmap image but the rasterization causes awful shapes that aren't circles. I have tried to input a vector image but it seems like Solidworks won't accept SVG or any other vector image formats (that I have tried).

So, my questions are these:

1) Is there a way to simply generate a sketch of a bunch of circles from, for example, a text file filled with x,y pairs and a specified radius?

If the answer to (1) is no, then:

    2) Can I generate a sketch from an SVG or other vector graphics file format?

    If the answer to (2) is no, then:

          3) Can I force the Trace to draw only circles? How about circles with a specific diameter?

If the answer to (3) is no, then maybe I'm out of luck. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has ever done this, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Ken