I have spent days trying to set up a decent drawing format and researching how to do things with the drawing templates and table templates etc all to no avail... I don't get why Solidworks has made setting up a default drawing format so difficult but sure wish they would figure out a way to fix it in the future.

Here are my biggest complaints that I can't find a solution to.

1) You can't add a BOM table to sheet template. I understand this is because there is no part/assembly referenced but is it really that hard to have a blank BOM in a template that is populated once the part/assembly is added to the drawing?

2) Revision tables unlike BOM's can be added but only with partial success. What I would like is for it to put the revision table in place and have revision 1 with a description "For Review" and then set the date as the date the drawing was created. So far I have only found it possible to get one or the other, I can create it so that it has the first revision listed with the description I want but I can't find a way to make the date automatic so have resorted to leaving it blank but that isn't a real solution... Other option is to input blank table format and then click to add revision but this requires the description to be entered every time on every sheet... 

3) Then when you click to add a new sheet to the drawing it again has no tables so you have to do everything again... You can add them in and have it linked to first page but it never anchors properly(always defaults to not anchored and even if you remember to click anchor it then defaults to top right anchor which you can't even change without first creating table and then going back in and changing it after...).

4) If you try to get around this by copying the original sheet and pasting it then everything looks good but the revision table isn't linked to the first sheet anymore for some reason...

5) It would be great to be able to create a list of common notes and then easily be able to choose which ones you want to have on the drawing. I have heard this is possible with autocad but have never used it. The best we have found is to have a list of notes on the sheet template which works ok but a guy spends a lot of time deleting unneeded notes or retyping which then leads to discrepancies between drawings(notes typed differently every time).

All in all these may seem like little trivial issues but in the end it can often lead to spending more time fiddling with drawing formats then actually creating the drawing... Whereas if it was possible to do the above things then all a guy would have to do is create a few different base templates and pick the right one for the situation and then start annotating.

If anyone knows any ways to solve some of the above issues I would love to hear them. Otherwise hopefully SW can improve on this in the future since imo this is one of the biggest weaknesses right now.