SolidWorks is an amazing tool that helps you to realise your ideas and take them from a concept, through every design phase, fleshing out all the details and efficiently preparing them for manufacture. As exciting as that is though, the journey from concept through to a finished product will almost always involve some manual or tedious steps. That's where SolidQ comes in. SolidQ has been designed to help engineers and designers save time by customising or automating key sections of their workflow. SolidQ comes with a number of tasks that can be applied to individual files or entire folders of parts and drawings. These tasks go beyond what is available with the SolidWorks Task Scheduler. They allow you to automate actions such as watermarking all of your drawings, exporting files to various formats, changing units, or apply materials to a file, or even creating flat patterns from sheet metal parts and saving them as DWG’s. Ready for the laser cutter. Those are just a few of the tasks available within SolidQ. If you want to take a look at the full list and find more information, then you can visit the SolidQ website. Getting started with SolidQ is simple. To begin, you'll always specify the files you want to change, either by dragging them in from the Windows Explorer or browsing for a file or folder. Note that if you browse for a folder, you can then add a filter to just select the parts or drawings or assemblies within that folder. After you've picked your files, you'll need to add tasks. The icons by each task over here tell you what type of file the task will affect. And if you want to learn more about what each task does, you can press the question mark to view the help file related to that task. After picking your task, selecting them in the queue will provide you with a set of options for you to configure them. Once you've set everything up as you require, then you can start the process just by hitting process queue. As the queue runs, you'll be shown the live report which makes it easy to monitor how your tasks are progressing. Additionally, if you have a particular set of tasks that you need to run regularly, you can also save your task set up as a SolidQ project which will allow you to really easily apply the same tasks with the same options to a new set of files in the future. So how do you get SolidQ?. Well, SolidQ comes in three varieties. Standard, professional and premium. SolidQ standard can run up to 50 files at a time and provides access to a subset of tasks. It is available to download and trial from the SolidQ website. To install it, you require a license key which you'll receive after completing the online registration. The professional version removes the 50 file limit and expands on the functionality of SolidQ standard with additional tasks. To install it, you'll need to purchase a professional license key and you'll always be able to find the latest price information for that on the SolidQ website. SolidQ Premium takes this one step further and adds integration with SolidWorks PDM Professional. If you have any specific requirements, or there are areas of your workflow that you think can be improved with automation, then we can also create bespoke, SolidQ tasks to meet your needs. SolidQ has been developed by Solid Solutions, the number one reseller of SolidWorks in the UK. We have been offering customisation services to our customers for the last 20 years, so we have plenty of experience when it comes to understanding our customers needs and then implementing a bespoke solution into their workflow. If you are interested and want to find out more, then please visit the SolidQ website or get in touch using the details on screen.