Bill of materials are always a hot topic of interest and usually get a pretty good round of applause at SolidWorks WORLD when they announce the upcoming enhancements during the Wednesday morning General Session.
SolidWorks 2010 will include a few new additional updates to the area of bill of materials. Some of these enhancements are probably bigger than others but all of them will be useful in certain circumstances.
Assemblies
In the upcoming release you will be able to set the following options for specific assembly components.
- exclude items from the BOMs
- edit the display of child components
- change how the part number is generated
- control how the quantity is figured out
To access these releases RMB click the component in the BOM and select Component Options
Linked BOMs
You will be able to link a new bill of material that you copied from a previously created assembly BOM. You will be able to do this from the BOM PropertyManager. Here is the cool part, if you update either the assembly BOM or the drawing BOM it will push back the changes to the other BOM. If you would like to unlink the BOM that is possible at any time as well but once it is unlinked you will not be able to relink it again.
To link the BOMs go to the BOM PropertyManager and under BOM Options select Copy existing table and Linked.
Part Descriptions
In the Configuration Properties PropertyManager of parts and assemblies you will see the option Use in bill of materials. When you type text for the Description and select Use in bill of materials it will use that part description as the description in the BOM.
Highlighting
This is a very cool update for BOMs. When you select an item in a BOM it will highlight it in the graphics area. This also works the reverse way, if you highlight a component in the graphics area it will also highlight it in the BOM.
Moving BOMs
SolidWorks 2010 also will give you the ability to move BOMs to different sheets within the same drawing file. You can move a BOM by dragging it onto a sheet tab, sheet icons in the FeatureManager tree, or a different window of the same drawing.
Jason, great posts for all the new features in 2010. I’m hoping to get our powers to be to upgrade us past 2009 to 2010.
Question: Does the BOM’s for the assemblies carry over to E-drawings?
Steve
hi steve, thanks for the comment and compliment. I do believe that the bom’s in the assemblies will carry over to e-drawings.
if i find out otherwise i will definitely let you know.
I still can’t understand how to get SW to automatically enter the thickness, width and length of a part.