Each year, SOLIDWORKS World has a top ten enhancement ideas countdown. For a couple of months before SOLIDWORKS World, ideas are submitted by users to the SOLIDWORKS World Top Ten idea forum (login required). Starting in mid-December, users have the opportunity to vote on the ideas they most want. This gives SOLIDWORKS a clear snapshot of what our customers need at that moment in time. The top ten vote-getters are shown on the big stage at that SOLIDWORKS World. The list varies from year to year as new enhancements are implemented or as customers’ needs change. Some ideas also reappear on the list over several years.

Dan Herzberg has compiled a list of these top ten lists, including when the ideas where implemented and how many times an idea appeared on the subsequent lists.

There is no focus on particular areas in the top ten list. The top ten highest vote-getting ideas are combined from parts, drawings, assemblies, and other areas. Since my main focus area on the SOLIDWORKS brand is “drawings”, it seemed like a nice idea to show the results for just the submissions for drawings.

We can show just the top ten Drawings ideas. Drawings includes topics such as BOMs, annotations, dimensions, etc. The first year we can look at is SolidWorks World 2011.

SolidWorks World 2011 Top Ten Drawings Ideas

Ability to Filter BOMs Print Selection – make it more like cropping a picture On drawings: add function to allow users to apply capitalization of text, implemented in SW2013 Assign watermark function to drawing sheets, implemented in SW2013 Allow Multiple Exploded Views per Configuration, implemented in SW2013 More control over angle dimensions, implemented in SW2015 On drawings: Allow option for resizing of drawing view outline Directly editing notes with properties in Drawing, implemented before SW2013 Broken-out Section in Section, Detail and Alternate Positions Views Better line selection in drawings, implemented in SW2014

The implementation rate for the SWW11 drawing list is 60% to date. None of these ideas had enough votes to get onto the official SolidWorks World 2011 Top Ten list, unfortunately.

There is still a couple of days to add new ideas on the current SOLIDWORKS World 2015 Top Ten list. Voting starts on the 15th, so go back and vote on as many ideas as you wish! Just remember, you have to logon to submit, see and vote for ideas.