If you spend a lot of time on detailing your designs in drawings, you MUST check out the Dimension Palette in SolidWorks 2011.  Never heard of it?  It was introduced in 2010 and made vastly better this year.

The dimension palette appears when you insert or select a dimension so you can easily change the dimension's properties and formatting. You can change things like the tolerance, precision, style, text, and other formatting options in the palette without going all the way over to the PropertyManager and dig through the tabs.

It used to pop up full size (but invariably in front of something you needed to see or select on your drawing), but in a great example of SolidWorks listening to you, the users, when they don’t get it quite right, as of 2010 SP3.0 it now appears as a small thumbnail icon   first.  It’s easy to ignore if you don’t want it but expands if you mouse over it to full size. 

In 2011 you’ll now find a whole new row of Alignment Tools and, most importantly, the Auto Arrange Dimensions button on the left.  This one tiny little button will save you tons of time on your drawings because you can now just window select a whole mess of dimensions (driven AND driving) and it will space them from smallest to largest, aligned and centered, spaced with the offset distances defined in Document Properties -> Dimensions, adjusted to avoid overlapping and staggered, if necessary.  Yes, it really does do all that stuff.

Below the alignment tools is a factor and thumbwheel for spacing dimensions.  So again, you can grab several dimensions of any type, and just roll the thumbwheel until things look good or you can enter an exact scaling factor (i.e. 2 = twice the spacing).

So go ahead, fear not the use of Model Items in your drawings!  Just be sure to UNCHECK the “Use dimension placement in sketch” in the options.  You can easily use the “Entire Model” and “Import items into all views” now without hesitation as it uses a new algorithm to place even Model Item dimensions cleanly and correctly.

And if you drag some stuff around and mess it all up, just window select the dimensions, hit that magic button Auto Arrange Dimensions, and it uses the same algorithm to put them all right back where they should be.