From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Including a bill of materials - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Including a bill of materials

“

- [Instructor] Once we have an assembly drawing, the next logical step is to bring in a bill of materials so we know which component is which. To do that, I'm going to choose one of the views. In this case, I'm going to choose this exploded view right here. And notice I have the 18.2 assembly drawing opened up. And right over here I can go Insert. Come down here to Tables. And then go over here to Bill of Materials. So when you jump into Bill of Materials, you got a bunch of different options here. So you've got a table to start with. You can make your own table or you can just use the standard one. I'm just going to go ahead and choose the standard one. You can have a anchor position, if you'd like. And then right over here you have the option of how you'd like to create that BOM. So you can choose top level, which is going to include only like, subassemblies and parts that are in this assembly. Or you can do parts only. So that's going to ignore subassemblies, And it's just going to bring in every single part you see in this design. Or you can do indented, and that's going to show what the subassemblies are, and then which components are in each one of the subassemblies. So, you have a bunch of different options. In this case here, I'm probably just going to choose the top level only. If you had multiple configurations of this assembly here, you could choose what those are right here. In this case, we do not have that. So, let's go ahead and not do that for right now. And then you can also choose how you want to group things together, right? Do you want to make them all show up as multiples of the same item, or you can do it from options here. You can keep missing rows, you can strike things out. You can start and increment your bill of materials at certain numbers. You can do borders, you can choose what layer you want. A whole bunch of different things you can do over here. And you can also make things like, all uppercase, for instance. Anyways, when you're happy with what your choices are over here, click on the green check mark. And now we've got a bill of materials that shows up on my tool tip. I'm going to go ahead and just place it right over here. And now I want to add a little more space, just kind of move things around in my drawing, just so I have space to put that bill of materials actually on the drawing. So, that looks a little bit better here. And I can drag this bill of materials on over here. Now some companies don't want you to have your bill of materials actually on the drawing. They want a separate document, like a Word document, or an Excel file, or something like that. Something that's showing the full bill of materials that they can bring into some type of a spreadsheet, or some other documentation system that's keeping it as a separate item, right? And you can do that easily by just clicking on this and just dragging it off the sheet. So it's still a reference to these components here. And then you can actually right-click and say, I'd like to export this sheet here. So I can go over here and say, Save As. And you can choose, instead of a template, you can actually come down here and save it as an Excel format, or text format, or a CSV, any of those kind of spreadsheet formats you can use. But in this case, I'm not going to do that. So then you can open that, of course, in Excel, create it, and then, you know, I said, depending on how the company might want the data to be presented or stored, that way you're not necessarily showing it on the drawing. But in this case, we definitely want to have that bill of materials on the drawing we can see here. And then let's go ahead and look at the bill of materials. So you can see here that nothing's really in order over here. Nothing really has a description, either. But it does have a quantity, so we're going to need to go in and add descriptions for each of these components, and probably do some kind of like sorting. And as far as sorting, notice I can filter things over here. Or if you right-click on the top there, you can come down here and say Sort, right? So I can sort by the part number, I can do ascending, descending. I can have a multi-sort, if it'd like. So let's try that. So click on that, and you can see here it does sort it, but because the way we have this numbered, it's not sorting it perfectly, right? So it's going P1, and it's going to going P10, 11, 12, and so on. But you can still just rearrange these. So click on a row and just drag it up. So P2's next. I kind of like, if I hold down Shift, I can select multiple lines at a time. and I can drag those up right over to here. And so I got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. All right, that's looking pretty good. So those are all in order, which I like to do. And also, if you have subassemblies, for instance, I like to put like the subassemblies at the top. Then any important real parts, something like that. And then, as you get down towards the bottom of the BOM list, that's where you want to put like things like hardware, or labels, or less important things. So everything you're going to make, the big assemblies, are going to be at the top. And that's just preference. But I just like to group mine like that so I know exactly where the components are in the BOM. And things like hardware, which may be changing more often, those are going to be towards the end of the BOM. And you can easily manipulate this a little different. Anyways, once you've got the BOM in there, you also have the option of bringing in other rows or columns, right? Bringing other information. Sometimes you might want to have like, the vendor, or the revision, or something like that beyond the part number description. You can add as many rows as you'd like. Actually, not rows. You can add as many columns as you'd like, right? So if you right-click up here at the top, you can say Insert, and you can add a column to the left or right. So I'm going to add one to the left. And then you can choose, a list of properties here, you know, measure, all the different things you can choose over here. And what we're looking for, in this case, it only has price in description. So I would like to add in the revision, but it's not showing up, right? So the reason it's not showing up here is this part, there's no option. Those haven't been added yet. So we need to go actually open up that part. So click over here, right-click, and say Open that part, right? And because it's an imported part, it's going to ask if we want feature recognition, and we say no. And then up here, under custom properties, notice it only has this thing called Price. Well, we really want to have something like description. We want to have something like revision, and so on. You might have one of these other things you might want to put in there. So make sure you add these custom properties ahead of time. So let's go ahead and put a revision A for this, and description this is going to be, I'll call it some kind of shaft. There it is, shaft. Okay. And the price doesn't make any sense. Let's just delete that. I mean, we don't even need that row, so let's delete it. So description, revision. And then by part number, if you don't select a part number automatically, I mean of course you can, but it'll just automatically use whatever that document name is. So click Okay, and then head back over to the drawing. And right over here you should be able to see that new column that was added, right? But there's nothing in that column. So let's go ahead and try to delete this column. So Delete, Column. And then try to add it one more time. So here's the shaft description, showing up. Right-click and Insert. Insert column to the left. And custom property. Now this time, description, price, and revision do show up. So I can choose revision now. And there's that revision A. So it's always looking for what those custom properties are in the individual parts. And once it's in one part, then you can automatically select it. And then of course we're going to need to go and add those to all of the rest of these parts here. They all should have a revision. They should all have a description. And those things will then show up in the bill of materials. But also, if you go ahead and create a drawing for those, that information will also propagate there. So anyways, that is how you bring in and work with a bill of materials inside of SolidWorks assembly drawings.

Contents