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abdullahkhalidslast Saturday at 7:51 PM2 repliesview on HN

> Every time I've used as a CAD GUI program I would get to this point where I would need to alter a single dimension by 0.25mm and realize that _all_ of my fastener holes, cutouts, etc have to be nudged with the keyboard or mouse to accommodate it.

I am just starting to learn CAD and FreeCAD - also dabbled a bit in OpenSCAD. But I do know that FreeCAD has Spreadsheets [1] and Configuration Tables [2] which allows you to define your model parameterically and changes values as needed.

How good this is, I don't know yet.

[1] https://wiki.freecad.org/Spreadsheet_Workbench [2] https://wiki.freecad.org/Configuration_Tables


Replies

ElCapitanMarklalast Saturday at 8:37 PM

It’s a fantastic feature and works really well, my problem is I can never invest the required time to learn the interface. It all falls apart when I need to switch modes to move something or whatever. With scad can usually knock whatever I want together pretty quickly without having to relearn how to use the tool.

MegaDeKaylast Saturday at 9:36 PM

Spreadsheets are really slow in FreeCAD. I'd suggest you look into Varsets [0] if you don't need some of the fancier capabilities that spreadsheets provide.

[0] https://wiki.freecad.org/Std_VarSet/en

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