Create Drawings

You can schedule tasks to create drawing files for SolidWorks part and assembly files. You can create drawings for individual files or all files of a specified type within a folder.

You can specify one or more files or folders, but you cannot specify both files and folders in the same task.

To create a Create Drawings task:

1. Click Create Drawings on the sidebar, or click Tasks, Create Drawings.

2. In the dialog box, type a new title for the task or leave the default in Task title.

3. In Please input a drawing template with predefined views, type the name of a drawing template file, or click Browse and browse to a drawing template file (*.drwdot). See Predefined Views in SolidWorks Help for information on creating and using drawing templates with predefined views.

4. Select the files or folders that you want to create drawings for:

• To select files:

1. Under Task files or folders, click Add File.

2. Select the type of file to create drawings for in Files of type.

3. Browse to the file, then click Open.

4. Repeat steps a, b, and c to select additional files.

• To select folders:

1. Under Task files or folders, click Add Folder.

2. Browse to the folder that contains the files to create drawings for, then click OK.

3. Under File Name or Type, click in the row that contains the folder you just added, then select the type of file to create drawings for.

4. Repeat steps a, b, and c to select additional folders.

5. If you do not want to include subfolders, clear Include subfolders.

To delete a file or folder from the list, click its number in the leftmost column, then click Delete.

5. Under Task output folder, select one of the following to specify where to store the drawing files:

• Same as original file.

• This folder. Type the path to the folder, or click to browse to the folder.

To schedule the task:

1. Under Task schedule, set:

• Running mode. Specifies how often the task runs. Select Once, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly.

• Start time.

• Start date.

2. Click Advanced if you want to change task options such as backup file location and time-out duration.

3. Click Finish.
   
   The task and its title, scheduled time, scheduled date, and status appear in the Tasks panel. The status of the task is Scheduled.

To run a scheduled task, your computer must be on at the scheduled start time. The SolidWorks Task Scheduler window does not need to be open. If your computer is off at the scheduled start time, the task runs when you turn your computer on.

At the scheduled start time, the task is initiated. If the task acts on more than one file, a sub-task is generated for each file. If you selected Backup task files in Task Options, a backup copy of each file is saved to a .zip file. Then a drawing is created for each file. When the task completes, the status changes to Completed.

After the task completes, click Completed to see the SolidWorks Task Scheduler Report.

If your backup files include Unicode file paths, use a zip file extraction application that supports UTF-8 encoding.