For those of you who have not had the (cough) pleasure(tounge in cheek) of using Pro E- Pro E has a button on the toolbar that toggles the visibility of ALL the planes (and axes, originpoints, etc) in a part or assembly. You can't pick which ones youwant to see, and which ones you don't (w/o considerable effort), soit can be quite sloppy if you've got a big assembly. SW kind ofdoes the same thing with temporary axes, and origins, but notplanes... It's sloppy, but if you want to quickly mate a part byorigin planes, it's a lot faster than browsing for the part in thefeature tree, expanding it's features, and guessing at what planeit might be (it's always the last one I try, btw...) that you want,over and over again...

BUT- SW has one feature that would totally rock and make this theholy grail- ISOLATE! It would save a ton of time if one couldquickly isolate the few parts you are mating, click one button (orbetter yet, press a shortcut-key on the keyboard) to quickly seeALL the planes in the visible parts, make your mate selections, andturn them off again w/ one storke of the keyboard...

It seems that both Pro E and SW have some great time savingfeatures (I'm horribly addicted to using center click to finishcommands as well... ), but totally miss the boat on others. If theywould just look at what good w/ their competition and copy it, orbetter yet, improve on it, we might start getting somewhere...

Another example- the measure tool in SW is leaps and bounds moreadvanced as well as faster to use than the Pro E measure dialogs(yeah, plural) and saves a lot of time if you are measuring manythings in an assembly... Can it be that hard to copy? But that'sprobably a discussion for the Pro E forums...

BM
SolidworksAssemblies