SolidWorks 2024 brings users more productivity when creating organizing and sharing assemblies. Let's take a look at the Bowheads front steering some assembly and check out some of the top enhancements for users that leverage configurations. Configuration descriptions are now shown alongside the configuration name in the Insert part Pulldown menu. This helps ensure proper configuration selection every time. SolidWorks 2024 also adds a new option to fix, float or fix the first when inserting a new component. This option is sticky and gives more flexibility to how you wish to work when placing components. After selecting the green checkmark, the steering knuckle is located at the origin, but in a floating state allowing you to move right into position and start mating. SolidWorks offers many ways to create needs outside of the Standard Paperclip tool. Using alt drag will automatically introduce, emit or using Windows control. Select will prompt the quick mate toolbar. With each release, SolidWorks is constantly evolving that. 2024 has overhauled how the Westminster solved and for advanced constraints. The widths and Tabs selection fields have been renamed in 2024. No matter how you select your table with selections, your constrained width will always solve correctly. Predefined mate references offer another way to speed up assembly design, but sometimes can fall short of proper definition and concentric mates are left free to rotate. Now in SolidWorks 2024, mate references have the option to be created only when a named reference exists. Improving overall performance when placing an option to lock rotation has also been added for concentric mates when adding a component with a named merit reference option selected and where multiple paired named references exist. The dropdown list is presented with all possible options making for precise met reference placement with a total of ten articulation fasteners added. It's time to clean up the assembly tree. Users have long had the option to add in component references, but this process can be repetitive. New in solar works 2024 Component references can be accessed from the top level of the assembly, where information can be added, removed or modified through a single table. Any duplicate inputs are flagged and these component references can be leveraged in drawings such as in a bill of materials or text call outs. It's common practice to share files and even more common to want to restrict intellectual property on the shared files. SolidWorks 2024 now offers an even more streamlined approach to featuring models through a rules based approach. Accessing a list of user created rules. This particular rule looks at a custom property saved to the file and simplifies each part of the model accordingly through a silhouette feature process. After less than a minute, the model is automatically featured and can be saved as a new configuration or as a new part altogether. Not everyone is working on the latest Build a SolidWorks workflow, such as saving out as a neutral file type, such as step or solid or common for backwards compatibility. That is no longer the case in SolidWorks 2024. Assemblies, parts and drawings can now be saved back to releases with previous release. Save mates are retained along with configuration information. Metadata exploded views and much more. SolidWorks 2024 also incorporates XR or extended reality translate. As for saving CAD data to industry standard, GL, TAF or GLB file formats, these formats can be consumed by many industry standard softwares to assist in composing VR or XOR experiences. Importing step files is a common translation between CAD systems, but for large step files, this can be a time consuming process. SolidWorks 2024 offers a new step file filter. This allows you to preview a step file and all of its components, then make selections of which files you wish to import and run the import. Giving up to a 30% improvement on import time on translating large step datasets. And finally, automatic match repair has been expanded to include component patterns. Opening this rear wheel, we can see the spokes are now missing the edge that was initially used to drive the pattern. This can easily be cleaned up through the in context toolbar and selecting the repair option. The process looks for a similar entity to reattach to the feature, allowing for a fast and efficient way to clean this up. A quick rebuild and we're all done. Whether it's day to day assembly operations defeaturing files or collaborating with older releases of SolidWorks or non SolidWorks data. 2024 is sure to bring more efficiency to your assembly process.