- [Instructor] Once you've been working
in SolidWorks PDM for a while and you've got
some projects in there, some various assemblies,
it might be time to start leveraging
the bill materials tool, so we're going to
take a little bit more in-depth look
at what that looks like inside of
the SolidWorks PDM Windows Explorer interface.
Let's open up Windows Explorer here.
I go under my vault, and take a look
at an assembly I've got here.
Sort by file type, and I happen to know
that this is the top level assembly.
We can see all the information
we've got here from the data card.
Versions, now let's get to the bill material.
Now that we've got our bill materials tab open
let's start from the top left corner and move across.
You can select a type of bill material,
so if you want to create a custom BOM,
say for weldments or sheet metal parts
or separating out purchase parts,
things like that, you can do that
in the background and then select
the type of BOM you want to view here.
Next is how the BOM is indented
in this feature tree view, so here we've got
indented, we can change that to parts only.
We could also do top level only.
I'm going to leave that as indented.
You can show the tree, you can hide the tree.
You can look at just specific assemblies
and what they contain, or you can
look at the top level assembly and
see what all the components are.
You can check if components are
activated or not activated in the BOM
if you've set the visibility of them.
You can hide selected things or show selected things.
Here you can see the different versions
of the as built or the latest, depending on
how you've done your rebuilds.
You can also change the versions too here,
so you can scroll through, so version one
might be different than version two.
Version one, you see as no BOM because
it was just inserted, once it was
checked in for the first time to create
version two we get all of the components.
Up here it gives us a list of our top level assembly.
As we move over we can save this BOM,
so we can save it as a SolidWorks BOM file.
We can also save it as a CSV file,
so I'm going to go ahead and do that for this
and we can take a look at that in a minute.
You can also open a CSV file,
search the BOM, so if you want to search
for certain components like bullet,
you can see here in our part number
we've got bullet and it was able to find it.
You can also compare bills of materials
so I can compare this bill of materials
to another bill of materials.
There's also help for the BOM.
You can configure your BOM in different ways,
sort it in different ways, it's basically
like using an Excel sheet.
If you want to you can go in and edit descriptions,
so I can go in right here
and make some edits, all kinds of things like that
so this BOM is a very powerful tool.
Very useful, especially when you fill in
all of the data in the background,
your descriptions, your part numbers,
and all the other metadata, you can
include that and add it on to your BOMs as well.
Let's go back now and take a look
at the CSV file that we created.
Here we go, I'm going to open up Microsoft Excel.
Now it's best to open it from inside Excel
and not just try to open it directly.
Automatically, Excel is going to recognize
that it's a CSV file and we're going to
have to sort it, so this is delimited.
They do it with a comma.
You can see now how all of the different
categories are sorted out properly.
Hit next and finish and here we go.
We've got a rough look at our BOM.
You can see we've got a file name,
part number, quantities, the workflow state,
descriptions, revisions, now you can also
add custom properties in to be tracked
as well, you can add statuses like
manufactured or purchased parts.
Basically, whatever is in your data card
as a variable that you're tracking,
you can push out into this BOM
so it can become very powerful.
In this one you'll notice that
it goes by levels and this is basically
how your feature tree would look,
so this is a stand-alone part,
this is an assembly and you can see
it's denoted by the 8.1, 8.2 for
all the parts that are contained in that
and you go down and the various assemblies
are treated the same way, so it kind of
gives you the hierarchy as well.
You can change that by changing
those various options we looked at
in the BOM before by doing indented,
parts only, or just top level only
and it'll export a different .CSV file.
The bill materials tool, very powerful, very useful.
Definitely leverage it any way that you can.