Marcus Reldin
Technical Consultant
PLM Group, Sweden

If you have an older version of SOLIDWORKS on your computer, there is a high probability that you will get all the search paths from the previous version into SOLIDWORKS. This is much appreciated, because then you do not need to change the path to drawing templates , BOM, etc. But unfortunately you often also get wrong shortcuts to many system templates.

The good news is that in 2017 we got a button in System Options ➜ File Locations: Edit All. When you click on Edit All, you get a list of all search paths. Run it through and check that nothing points to an old installation.

There are two standard search paths in SOLIDWORKS:

C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS\lang\english

and

C:\ProgramData\SOLIDWORKS\SOLIDWORKS version\lang\english

For example, if you have the wrong search path in ProgramData, then you cannot set the diameter of a drawing because the diameter symbol itself is in the search path of the Symbol Library File.

I myself have many different versions of SOLIDWORKS installed, and with each new installation I click on Reset ➜ Reset this page only to reset all search paths so that they point to the correct folder. Then I go in and put my own paths to my templates.

If you want to know more about standard search paths you can find info here: SOLIDWORKS Help.

Translated by Jan Egil Bæver