But don’t worry if you don’t have internet access – when you launch the Help file you will be prompted to open the offline copy installed on your machine instead. And if you don’t like the Web Help, you can disable it by unchecking SolidWorks >> Help >> Use SolidWorks Web Help.
Because the Help files are now online, you can browse them through your normal web browser:
2011 SolidWorks Help - Welcome to SolidWorks Online Help
Rather than using the in-built Web Help search field in the top right corner, you can search all help documentation using Google.
In the Google search field, type “site:help.solidworks.com” without the quotes (note there is also no space between “site:” and “help.solidworks.com”), followed by your search terms – voila!
Searching through Google gives you the benefit of more relevant results, although this isn’t as much of a problem with the SW Web Help search if you know the title of the page you’re searching for.
However, here’s an example where we don’t know the title of the page; we want to know the formula used to configure part colour in a Design Table (as you’ll see, it’s not something you’d memorise!).
Searching for the keywords “colour design table” yields these results:
The page we are after is the first result through Google, but only the 7th result through the Web Help search.
The “site:help.solidworks.com” term in the search above limits your search terms to the SolidWorks web domain hosting the help files. You can use this to force Google to search any web domain – one I also use a lot is “site:en.wikipedia.org” which searches all English-language Wikipedia articles.
You can also learn about more advanced Google search features:
- http://www.google.com.au/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861
- http://www.google.com/landing/searchtips/#helpcenter
Happy searching!
