- [Instructor] If I want to edit, or customize,
or even create my own reports,
I have the ability to do that as well.
So let's just take a look at this
bill of materials as an example.
Maybe I want to customize it a little bit.
So if it's just very slight edits like text size,
font, color, maybe the columns that are coming in,
and so on I can just jump into the project tab,
and just right into reports and whichever report I want
to customize or change,
I'll just grab the bill of materials,
I can go into properties and this will
give me kind of all of the properties
of that specific report.
So here for example I can change
the amount of columns, which columns come in,
the size of the columns and so forth.
So maybe I can see my description column
is a little bit too large for me.
So I'm just going to change the description width here.
And we can see that automatically update in my preview.
And then I just finish this off with apply
and recreate my reports and it would
be this new bill of materials.
I can of course change a lot of
other things here as well.
Maybe the font size, the color that's coming in,
the text style and everything like that.
But those are just some minor changes let's say.
If however we really want to create a completely new
or custom report I also have the ability to do that.
So I can just close out of all of this
and how I would do that is just as we've seen before
by jumping into the project tab and
the configurations drop down where
we've pretty much customized everything here,
the project, the wire styles, the PLCs and so on,
just the same we can customize or create our own reports.
And same idea here as we've seen before
we have project wide reports as
well as application wide reports that span
all of our projects and here are just
all of the Solidworks Electrical defaults.
And of course you can create new,
you can duplicate, you can edit,
you can delete, whatever you'd like.
So in this case again I'm going to stick
with the bill of materials so let's
jump over to me by bill of materials here.
So I can find my bill of materials again
the ones that are in bold are
the reports that I'm currently using.
And let's say I wanted to edit or change
that or even create my own custom bill of materials.
You know specific for my company or whatever it might be.
So what I like to do I can edit this directly
again just jump into the properties
and make whatever changes I'd like.
I however don't usually like playing around
with the SolidWorks Electrical defaults
because once you've changed them
then you've essentially lost that default
until you reinstall or something like that.
So I like to keep all the defaults as is
and maybe just make a duplicate
of them if I want to create my own custom ones.
So I can just grab this bill of materials
so that's going to stay as is.
And then I can just create a duplicate of this.
And now I've just created an exact copy
of that existing bill of materials.
Now what I might want to do first step
is give it a nice rename so I'll just
go into the name here and maybe I'll
call this Justin's Bill of Materials.
And description just the same.
So again most likely you'd create your own
for your specific company that would
have all the needs or requirements
of your own bill of materials.
So now I still have the SolidWorks Electrical default
if I ever need to jump back to that.
And now I have a new one as well
called JUSTINS BOM here which is an exact copy of that.
So now I can play around here,
make any edits, changes I may need
and I still have the original as well.
So I'll just jump through each of the tabs.
I'll go to styles here.
Maybe I want to change some text color.
Some text sizes.
And you know a number of things again
we have this nice preview here showing
me exactly what I'm changing and
make whatever slight changes I may want.
Jump into columns.
I think that my description's a little bit
too long so I'm going to make
that a little bit shorter let's say.
What we can also do here which
is usually quite useful is rearrange our columns
and also add more columns.
So maybe I want quantity at the very end
I can just click and drag and I've
moved quantity to the very end of my table.
If I want to add additional columns
I can just click on column management here.
And that will pop up all of my columns
that I can call upon so essentially
this is all of the information
that I've put into my database.
I can now pull this information out if I'd like.
So I have a whole bunch of information
that I can pull from maybe I can throw in
a location or a supplier number
or whatever values you'd like.
Maybe I'll throw in location or location description.
And that's been added to my table as well
I can rearrange it wherever I'd like.
So that is all very simple to make these types of changes.
If you really want to customize your bill of material
maybe actually throw some calculations in there,
throw in any other values essentially if there's
anything in this column management list
that I'm not seeing that I'd like to throw in
you can actually code your own SQL queries
to pull pretty much any table you'd like.
So that's quite a bit more involved and complex
and I don't suggest going there unless you're
very comfortable with SQL and creating SQL queries
but you do have that possibility if you're interested.
And so to do that again maybe this is best
left for someone in IT or a software engineer
or whatever it may be or if you're
just very comfortable with SQL of course
you can do it as well but just be aware
that if you're doing this again you'd
want to create those duplicates because
if your code doesn't run you're going
to break this report essentially.
So if I really want to customize even further
than what's available here I can just
click on this button that says activate expert mode.
And I even get a warning here saying
are you really sure about this?
You're diving into kind of the source code here
and if you make some mistakes some things might break.
The software of course will not break
it will work as expected but just
this specific report that I'm pulling might no longer run.
If I'm confident I can say yes okay.
And here we can see is my SQL query.
So I can take a look here just to see
the complexity here and if you're not
comfortable or familiar with SQL at all
this might just look completely foreign
and if that's the case again I wouldn't suggest
jumping into this area or editing these values too much.
But if you are comfortable of course you
can just jump in here, edit this code,
edit this SQL query and essentially pull
any information from our database,
throw in calculations if you'd like,
whatever it might be.
But again be careful of course.
If you make any coding mistakes here
this report will no longer run.
Then once you're happy with any
of your edits or changes or whatever it might be
you just hit apply and close and you've
just created your own very customized report.
In this case I just created JUSTINS BOM here,
Justin's Bill of Materials and I didn't
change too much I didn't jump into
the SQL code or anything like that
I just changed hex sized,
added one more additional column as well.
So that's how you'd generate and
create your own custom reports.
Now let's generate that report within our project.
So same as before go into the project tab.
Go into reports.
And here are my defaults but maybe
I also want to add in just to show the difference
that new report I just created called JUSTINS BOM.
I'll say okay to that.
And as you can see it looks the same here
again all I really changed was text and color
and I also have this new column location
that I threw in and my quantity is
now my last column here.
Okay if I'm happy with that maybe
I delete the other bill of materials as well
but I'll just throw it in to show the comparison here.
And I can just say generate drawings once I'm happy.
Turn on my JUSTINS BOM as well.
And again it will take a minute
to generate any new reports here.
And it looks like it succeeded.
And I'll close out.
Here's my original bill of materials that I created
and just as a comparison I also
have my JUSTINS BOM down here.
And if I take a look at that it just changed
very slightly I have the larger red font
for the title here, my description column is now shorter.
My quantity column is now my last column
and I also have the location information
coming in there as well.