Hi all,

Back on SolidWorks 2015 in a new role after working for a few months with Inventor and trying to get back into it,

basically I have 2 big questions that I never really understood when I had used SolidWorks in the past...

1. Custom Properties within drawings

I have started working for a reasonably large company and one of my first tasks is to create procedures and rules for other designers to follow.. one of which is to incorporate automatic fields within the drawing borders to save time such as drawing name, title, date etc. Like i say, I have been using Inventor for a while now and Im used to their ways of working such as using the iProperties to link to the drawing which I found really easy after I had set it up properly and im hoping there is a better way of doing this using SolidWorks.

2. Saving parts/ assemblies without changing the originals

One big problem im having is trying to work out how to save parts that already exist on the companies server and clone them so I do not have to make the product from scratch.. so far, I have tried using the save as copy command but the changes i make to the new product still changes the original file to (which could be a major problem at some point).. Inventor has an application that allows you to save a copy of an assembly and cut all ties with previous models making them two separate parts

I hope these questions aren't ridiculous or really stupid as im sure there are ways around them, i just haven't been able to figure it out yet.. I have been given some time to get this sorted and would like to do it properly first time in order to save myself some stress in future,

Thank you in advance for the tips and help!

Dylan