With the Power Select Tool, You DO Have the Power

Have you come across a situation where you had to manually select a group or combination of similar items (fillets, holes, etc.) on your model? Did you find yourself spending a lot of time making sure your selections were correct and didn’t miss anything? Ever think to yourself, “There’s got to be an easier way?" Well, you’re in luck because there IS an easier way, using the Power Select tool included in SOLIDWORKS Utilities.

The Power Select tool allows you to bulk select entities in a part that meet a certain set of criteria that you specify. The tool can be accessed by clicking on Tools > Power Select. This opens the tool in the Task Pane, where you can specify what you want to select: Edges, Loops, Features, and Faces. You can dial in your selection criteria using a combination of Filters and Parameters such as Face or Feature Color, Feature Type, etc. Additional options are also available based on your filter selection. For example, if you choose to select by Face Color, you can specify the color from a pop-up window or even choose to pick the color from by clicking on the face in the graphics area.

In this example, our goal is to modify this part by removing all the holes and most of the fillets to simplify it for an FEA analysis. So we’ll check the boxes for Features, and Feature Type. We’ll then check the boxes for Fillet/Round, and Simple Hole and click Search.

This will select all the items based off your criteria. The features will be listed in the Results window and will also highlight them in the graphics area.

Click Close to exit the tool and all the specific items that met the criteria we just specified are automatically highlighted and selected. If needed, you can deselect any of the selections as well. Be sure to hold down the Ctrl key when you do. We can now do any operations we wish (suppress, color, delete, etc.). We’ll right-click in the graphics area and choose to Suppress these selections.

Now we have a configuration of our model with the specific features removed based off our Filters and Parameters selections.

From this example, you can see how the Power Select utility can save you a lot of time by automating the selection of entities that meet your specific criteria. Give this tool a try!