alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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This is an outdated advice. Spreadsheet is hard to use in comparison to VarSets [0]. Recent changes in 1.1 make them even easier and more intuitive to use.
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.
This seems like good advice. To this day I haven't explored spreadsheets or variable sets, which makes resizing stuff a giant pain in the ass.
This is an area where FreeCAD really needs work: scaling stuff.
Some CAD systems, i think NX for example, let you give it a reference to an actual Excel (or csv?) file, that you edit in Excel.
Or don't and adjust it in the sketcher? If you name your constrains you can just reference them directly elsewhere.
I think that's much easier as you don't have to go back and forth with a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets are better in theory but varsets work so much better in practice.
Other cad tools do support this but in my experience it's always pretty awkward to use. I haven't tried the FreeCAD implementation.
You can also use VarSet[0], which I think is easier than spreadsheet since you don't have to switch the workbench.
[0]: https://wiki.freecad.org/Std_VarSet