odd behaviour with Area Hatch/Fill

[weirDeveloper]

Hi,

I'm new to SW - using SW 2011.

I've filled a few small area of a drawing, and that worked fine.

Some larger areas are showing odd behaviour. While I am editing a sketch, the colours of the fills look correct, but when I Exit Sketch, all my fills turn to grey. Moving my mouse across the filled areas, some flash to orange, then back to gray (orange wasn't my chosen colour).

It seems like buggy behaviour to me, but then being new to SW, I might be missing something simple.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

John

 

[weirDeveloper]

Exasparated!

My sketch is a 2D sketch. What do you mean by create a 2D sketch? If I click on Sketch, the Property Manager for Edit Sketch tells me to 'Select a plane, planar face or and edge...' etc . If I click on anything, everything but one line is selected. If I then deselect, and just select a few lines around and area, then click 'Convert entities', all that happens is that the Convert entities Property Manager pops up, with none of my selections included. After the Property Manager pops up, trying to select anything has no effect at all.

It's pretty frustrating to be clicking away, and what I expect to happen doesn't, and so often there's no message to suggest what's wrong.

Why do my selections disappear when I hit 'Convert entities'?
Why can't I add entities in the Property Manager once I've clicked Convert entities?
Are all my entities already converted (to what?). How would I know?

I've run through all the tutorials, and watched YouTube vids, and done some exercises. Some of the work I do goes so quickly, it's easy to see the power of SW, but I still spend most of my time banging my head against the wall with issues like this. Is it just me, or is SW especially uninformative about the state of what you're looking at, and making procedures clear?