Discussion
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_whiteCaps_: I post this in every FreeCAD thread: If you're going to start designing something with it, use the spreadsheet tool to make everything parametric. You'll save yourself a ton of time as your designs get more complicated.Maybe this isn't anything new to experience CAD users. I don't know if other CAD tools do this as I started using FreeCAD after playing with 3D printing.
sho_hn: It's very common (Fusion calls it User Parameters, etc.) and indeed nice practice. FreeCAD has a few ways to do it, Spreadsheets but also free-form properties on objects. It's very flexible in this regard.
gligorot: The Fusion implementation sucks. A spreadsheet is a far more natural way to do this, Im surprised FreeCad is doing it better than the paid variant.
_whiteCaps_: Super flexible. I love being able to use Python to manipulate spreadsheet data.
cgearhart: Slightly unrelated to this story, but I’m curious if anyone has good resources for learning FreeCAD. I have quite a lot of experience with SolidWorks, AutoCAD, OnShape, and similar software, but FreeCAD has always been hard for me to pick up.
jjkaczor: MangoJelly on YouTube was my primary learning source, and a few other channels - but his "gelled" with me the best.
Lukas_Skywalker: The only issue I have with the Spreadsheet is that I need to add an alias for every value I want to use in the Sketch or Part Design workbench. In practice, this usually looks like A B width 2mm length 3mm and for every cell in B I add an alias with the same value as in column A. Is there a way around that?
jjkaczor: Hmmm - I seem to recall there was at least 1-2 scripts or macros available to help with aliasing.
_whiteCaps_: https://wiki.freecad.org/Macro_EasyAliasEasyAlias macro maybe?
mft_: I often recommend https://youtube.com/@deltahedra3d - some good tutorial videos and other excellent FreeCAD content.
