If you aren't familiar with multibody (un-merged) parts, I would strongly encourage you to learn more about them. You have to learn the particulars about how it affects patterning, mirroring, extruded cuts, etc. but it is an extremely useful approach for my work. In fact, its my default setting now. It creates a lot more options of "how to do stuff" for me. One reason is that it more closely tracks with how things are done in the real world.
For example, say in the real world you drill a hole thru one piece and then weld it to another one so that one end of the hole is covered. You have created a blind flat bottom hole. In SW you create the part using two Extrude Boss commands. If those two Extrude Bosses are "merged", they are one body. A Hole Wizard drilled hole includes the conical point at the bottom, just as a normal hole does in the real world. There is no easy way to drill through one welded part without leaving that conical point cut in the mating part. But Hole Wizard (as most other cut features) allows you to select which bodies the feature applies to. If you modeled those two Extrude Bosses as unmerged bodies, you can insert a Hole Wizard hole all the way thru one body and have zero effect on any other body.
A section view of merged bodies shows no separation line, because there isn't one. A section view of unmerged bodies will show the edge between them.
In drawings, one of the options in the Relative View command is to select which body or bodies to show in that view. That way you can show all the cutting and fab details to be done on any single piece before welding. It is our default method of showing weldment detail pieces.
When you declare a part to be a weldment, SW does several things. It sets all future extrusions to non-merged unless you select otherwise. It converts the Bodies List to a "Cut List". It also creates default configurations "as welded" and "as machined".
We use it a lot!
