From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

Including a bill of materials - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

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Including a bill of materials

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- [Instructor] Once we have a drawing of the assembly the next logical step is to add in a bill of materials. Now to do that, let's go ahead and click on one of these views here. I generally choose the isometric view. And then come up here to insert, tables, bill of materials. OK, now, once we have the bill of materials dialog box opened up over here, we have a few different options. The first one is the BOM type and right now we have the top level only selected. What that means is that it's only going to show the individual parts that are in the top level as well as the sub assemblies. It's not going to call out the individual parts that are in the sub assemblies. Now if you go to parts only bill materials, it's going to basically dissolve the sub assemblies and show every single part that is in the entire assembly. And then finally, the indented version is going to show, not only the individual parts, but then they're going to show the sub assemblies as well as the parts that are in those sub assemblies. So you have a couple different options. I generally try to put in the top level only into my assembly drawings and then make individual drawings of those sub assemblies which will also have their own bill of materials. But another thing you can do is you can actually add two bill of materials. One is a top level only and then second is maybe a parts only and then maybe move the parts only one off the screen or off your drawing sheet and use that as just a reference for how many components are in the actual design. In fact, you can even export that to Excel and then use it for keeping track of your bill of materials. Alright, for right now though, let's go ahead and just use the top level only and just use all the other defaults in here. And then go ahead and click on OK and that bill of materials should show up right here in your tool tip and you can place it pretty much anywhere you want in the drawing. I'm going to go ahead and place it right down here. And then let's go ahead and zoom in on there and see what's going on. Alright, so the first thing I want to point out is you got a whole bunch of different parts in here and down here is the last one is a sub assembly. Notice we're kind of missing a few descriptions here so you might want to actually go in to individual components here and add in those descriptions so things look a little bit cleaner. The other thing we might want to do is sort the bill of materials. Notice right now, it's not in order. So if I right click up here on the top column, I can then come over here to sort and I can sort it by ascending or descending and I can do a secondary sort if I'd like to. But right now let's just go ahead and use the ascending part number, click on OK and you can see there I can quickly sort the bill of materials so it makes sense. OK, the next thing I can do is actually add a column. So if you right click up here, you can say insert, column to your left or right, if you want to put one over here to the left, and then you can link that to some other custom property or unit of measure and equation, an item number or part number, whatever you want to put in there, you can basically put something there, link it together. Or you can just leave it blank. That's OK as well. You can just then maybe put in like who you're buying it from or your vendor. You can manually type that in or you can link that back to a custom property. So you have a whole bunch of different options there. You can of course move these columns around a little bit and adjust them. You can add in column headings. Whole bunch of things you can do with this bill of materials and you can also specify where you're getting your part number from. Over here, notice it's linked to a part number. If you don't like that part number, you don't like that linking, right now it's choosing the regular part number that's assigned to the part. You could also come over here and then maybe link it to a custom property and there's also like a part number up in the custom property or something like that you might want to link to. You have that ability. But in this case, let's go back and leave this linked over here to the part number and we should be all set. Alright, once we got the bill of materials in here, we've got the next logical step's going to be adding in some balloons so we know which one of these lines corresponds to which one of these components. So let's go ahead and add a couple balloons. In the next video, I'll show you how to do that.

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