- [Instructor] One thing that's important to understand
when working with bills and materials,
is that they are driven off
of the custom properties in the background.
So the custom property for each of these parts.
For part number, links to the file name.
For the description, it goes to the custom property
of the description inside of the part.
For the quantity, it links to how many of these items
exist inside of this drawing view inside of the assembly.
Now, we can add more columns to our bill of materials
and track other custom properties as well.
And as you go on to customize
your own bills of materials in the future,
this can be really handy.
I'm going to just show you one example really quick.
So if I right click on this last column
and I say insert column to the right,
automatically it's asking me,
what do you want to show here?
Do you want to show a part number?
An item number?
A unit of measure?
So maybe you want to know something
about the weight or if it's in inches
or in metric or anything else like that.
But I'm going to stick with custom property
and under property name,
I'm going to go down
to the Solidworks property for configuration.
So let's say for example,
you have multiple configurations of this item.
A lot of people do use configurations
that can be really handy.
So I'm going to hit configurations and you see
that all of these items fill in
and the heading does as well.
So I'm going to go ahead and click over here in this area,
drag my column out and resize it
so that I can read it a little bit.
And if I zoom in over here,
you can see that for the items
that only have the typical default configuration
it's listed as such.
But where I have custom configurations,
like the long and short configurations for these parts
those are listed out as well.
And at the top it tells me
this is what I'm tracking
the Solidworks configuration name
and then in parentheses it gives you the description of that
in case it's using a hyphenated or abbreviated
description of that custom property.
So pretty cool feature
if you use a lot of custom properties in the background
and you want to include that information here,
you can insert a new column
and link it to custom properties that are specific
to the assemblies and parts that you're working on.