Hi everyone,

This is my first posting, hope it goes well! First off, my project has been to assemble 100s of variations of vinyl fencing broken down into roughly 8 major styles (ie Privacy fence, Semi-privacy fence, Ranch fence, Closed Picket, Open Picket, etc. ) utilizing Solidworks. The next part of the project is to make a drawing file for each major style that is composed of all of the renditions of that respective style. As of right now, my process is as follows:

                                             1. Open Template

                                             2. Bring in a dimetric view of the first fence section for the given file

                                             3. Bring in the next view

                                             4. Dimension and Callout

                                             5. Copy and paste the drawing sheet I just created so that I now have 2 identical sheets (ie 2 pages with the same exact information on both)

                                             6. Delete the drawing views then recreate those exact views in their exact location but with the next style of fence.

                                             7. Do this over and over for the next 2 weeks until the project is finished

This is where you guys come in. What I am looking for is a way for myself to, in essence, replace the components as you could in an assembly but instead in a drawing. I've done a fair amount of research and learned about rereferencing the file but I am not having any luck with it. Every time I have tried to reference, say Model_1 with Model_2, instead of giving me the option to keep Model_1 and paste Model_2 to a sheet after it, it justs replaces Model_1 with Model_2 everywhere it's found. From this behavior I have decided if no one is able to help that I should be able to go ahead and complete one of the larger style's drawing file and then when creating the next style, use the referencing tool to replace the file I want with the file's I have. That should work fine, but I was really hoping to cut a couple more corner's to save time and to finally move on from this project! Thanks in advance for any assistance you may give!

Kindest regards,

Tyler

ps, If you are wondering; every fence that was created is it's own seperate file... I know, I know, I should have created a file for each style and then configurations for each fence section. It was going to be a headache so I didn't because the fence sections of a certain style weren't similar enough to use configurations.

Also is there a way to format the certain dimensions to automatically update what they say according to an excel like equation?