Flag Notes: How to Clearly Communicate Important Drawing Notes

By Silvio Perez

One of my new favorite features that has been introduced for Drawings in SOLIDWORKS 2016 is Flag Notes. This is a great new feature to associate notes to balloons marked on a drawing.

So how does it work?

The first thing to do is add notes to the drawing. These can be operations that need to be done to a part or assembly that can only be clearly communicated by calling it out through notes. We then want to consider changing our numeric value to have a symbol to make it more unique and easier to find on the drawing after we link it to a balloon. All we have to do is click on the number and on the property manager, and then we can add the note to the Flag Note Bank section, then click on the symbol pull down menu and choose what symbol we want.

After we have added our notes and associated symbol to it, we can then add our balloons that will be linked to the note. We can navigate to INSERT>ANNOTATIONS>BALLOON and select the feature to add the balloon to the appropriate location on the model in which we want to call out. Once the balloon is placed, we can select the balloon and select in the property manager to enable the option Flag Note Bank. In the actual Flag Note Bank, we can select the note we want to link, and will notice the balloon will match the note number and symbol. You will also notice that we can hover over the balloon and the linked note appears in the pop up message.

What’s really nice about this feature is that even if we make changes to our notes such as adding a new note in between the current notes that have already been created, the number scheme will be updated along with the balloon number. The same goes if we delete a note, we do not have to go back and manually update the numeric order.

Now with this new Flag Note feature, we can feel a little bit more confident that special operations will be clearly communicated from designer to manufacturer eliminating any costly mistakes that previously may have been made due to a loss in translation from Notes.

To see this feature in action, see my YouTube video found here!

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