Displaying File Properties in Windows Explorer

This guide is written to help users display file properties in Windows Explorer to provide more information on a part while navigating to it. File properties such as description, title, author, and many other properties can be displayed while searching for parts in the Windows Explorer

After creating a part, assembly or drawing, select the “File Properties” shown in the image below.

After opening the “File Properties”, properties such as title, subject, and author can be seen in the “Summary” tab shown below.

Other custom properties may also be added in the “Custom” tab. Please note that only certain custom properties are recognized by the Windows File Explorer. The image shown below demonstrates the process of adding a custom property.

As shown above, there are many options for various property names. In order to see the custom properties displayed, the Windows Explorer display setting must be set to “Details”. To do this, select the arrow next to the “Change your view” icon as shown in the image below.

After selecting the arrow, choose the “Details” option. This will then display some of the default custom properties of each file. To enable which properties are displayed in the Windows Explorer, right-click the top of the columns in Windows Explorer and select “More..” The image below shows where this option is.

After selecting “More…” there will be a window with a list of details to be shown. Please note that the custom properties displayed for each SOLIDWORKS file is limited to the Windows Explorer details option shown in the window below.

In many cases none of the selected custom properties appear. This is usually caused by an incorrectly registered .dll. Please follow the instructions shown in the link below to register the proper .dll.

https://support.hawkridgesys.com/hc/en-us/articles/212520817-Losing-Description-in-Custom-Property

If the properties still do not appear, unregister the .dll by typing regsvr32 /u instead of regsvr32 as shown in the guide in the link above, then re-register it. After adding the desired custom properties, the Windows Explorer detail columns should look similar to the image below.