I will say this up front. I have not installed 2018 Beta1 as I still need to get the IT department here onboard. I was aware of the improvements to large assemblies from the SWW2017 development skits and that is a major reason that I joined the beta forums even without IT enabling me to install the software.

The number 1 place where the company I work for suffers frustrations is when anyone is working on drawings of large assemblies. I was hoping that with the improvements to large assemblies we would also see major improvements to the corresponding drawings. From what I have read here the large assembly improvements in 2018 beta have very little to no improvement on drawings. The changes to large assemblies look to be a huge improvement and exactly the type of thing that was needed. I will be recommending to update to SW2018 as soon as possible because of this and other changes.

Further background, I pushed the company that I work for to bring in someone for training that could really help and offer solid solutions. I don't know if it was luck or the gods were smiling on us but we managed to get ​ for a day of consulting to help determine our issues and then ultimately 3 days of training. As I am sure the case is much of the time we were doing many things right but a few things wrong. Alin straightened us out and our rebuild and loading times were reduced. Unfortunately those improvements didn't do a lot for our drawings. Alin's next suggestion was detached drawings. My investigations have been fairly well documented in 's thread on detached drawings starting with Alin's comment #24 here https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/54495?start=15&tstart=0 . To me it looks like detached drawings are a great start on dealing with large assembly drawings but there are so many improvements that could still be made. It also does not appear that detached drawings have had any major improvements or time invested into them for many releases.

Before we started using detached drawings we would be lucky to get two, single page customer drawings complete in a day of work. If all wait times were eliminated from the process we could easily complete 8+ of these type of drawings in a single day. It was nearly impossible to give any sort of timelines to the powers that be. Now with detached drawings detailing of a drawing is much faster but we still need to get to the point where we can detach the drawing and it can take a considerable amount of time. Large Assembly Drawings are the single most frustrating thing for everyone that works at our company to deal with. We are lucky that only 10-20% of our time is spent working in these large assembly drawings or there would be a lot more bald people working here.

Hopefully someone can let me know if 2018 Beta did have large improvements to loading/rebuild times and general operability of large assembly drawings. This type of testing would be one of the first things I would do if I could install the 2018 Beta. I look forward constructively discussing with anyone on how to make drawings the least frustrating part of a day.

Thanks,

Grant