SOLIDWORKS Tech Tip – Formatting the Date in SOLIDWORKS Electrical

When we’re starting a new design and creating new drawings, we like to keep track of who created the document, and when that document was created. The easiest way to display that information is with names and dates in our title blocks. However, in varying locations around the world, we prefer to display the date format on our drawings differently.

Some companies choose to display the date format as DAY-MONTH-YEAR, while other companies may prefer MONTH-DAY-YEAR. The previous two examples are standard formats that are built into SOLIDWORKS Electrical, but what about when our company standard requires a different format?

Well, why not create your own format! It’s actually very easy to do! 

Within the Project configuration menu’s General tab, when taking a look at the date display format, we can see that it appears to be a drop down menu.

But, in addition to being a drop down menu, this line also has the ability to accept text.

We do have the ability to type anything in this box, but leaving it in a plain text format like this will create this sentence as the date for every document – which is obviously not what we want. We still need to have some type of format for the date, because we need to pull the date information from our computer’s system settings.

Lucky for us, within the SOLIDWORKS Electrical Help Documentation, there is a large list of variables we can choose from to create our own unique date format. Below is a screenshot of the variables we have available to us.

So now, if we want to display the date as 01-OCT-2019, or maybe we want to get really detailed and include hours, minutes, seconds, and time zone – we can easily build that in!