Inserting a bill of materials - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Instructor] When you're working with assembly specifically, the use of a bill of materials can be really critical. It gives you the ability to share with everybody else what all the items are how to label them and then include some information. And this bill of materials that I have on my sample drawing here I've just got the part number which actually pulls the file name and solid works. And then also the custom property of the description and the quantity. We also have an item number which is automatically generated. I'm going to zoom out a little bit and click on this bill of materials. If we look at the various options that we have you can show a top level only bill of materials which will not show parts included inside of sub-assemblies. You can show parts only just the parts that are located inside of it. So it will not include a assembly but will include the parts inside of it. And you can also include an indented view which I find the most helpful. It shows you a list of all the components that are in it and it gives you a way to detail the numbering so that you can tell which components are inside of a sub assembly, for example. So this crank sub assembly contains the crank shaft crank arm and crank knob. And that's denoted here by the 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3. If I click on this cross on the top left again it brings us back to the properties of our bill of material. I'm going to expand some of the options down below. You can have all kinds of different ways to display the information that you have from your drawing view. So if you have multiple configurations, for example you can switch which configuration you list here. Maybe you're showing one configuration but you want to list a bill of materials for a different one. You can do that. You can decide how parts are labeled when you have groups of them. So should you display all of them as one item number or as multiple item numbers? Because each item, even though it's the same part is its own item in your bill of materials that needs to be accounted for. You have all those different combinations of how you can display those items here. You can handle what you do with missing items and missing rows. Again, we have some options here about what numbers to start with. So if you want to start with the number one or some other number, because you're adding this onto another bill of materials somewhere else from another drawing that might be handy. And then we also have some typical border options down here. This is a really nice feature. Like you'll notice right here. I have all mixed lowercase, uppercase wording. You can now go all the way down to the bottom with the text format, click on all uppercase. That is so handy when you're trying to make really professional looking 2D drawings inside of solid works engineers work with the uppercase, you might not be collaborating with other designers who use that to name their files or fill in their description information. So being able to turn that on and off is really handy. So we've looked at some of the properties of how to edit this bill of material. You can also grab it up here using the move icon and drag it around. And it'll snap to various positions. You can adjust it down on the bottom, right. Dragging it out and resizing it. When you click on it, you do get this toolbar which gives you the ability to edit the format of what you have going on. So the alignment, again, creating all uppercase or all lowercase fitting text if need be merging cells together if you want to. So I can select the multiple cells and merge them together or unmerge them. I can also do some work with equations, just a lot of great options here inside of the bill of materials. I'm going to go ahead and actually select this and hit delete and delete this bill material, and now insert a new one. So I'm going to hit insert. I'm going to go to tables and I'm going to just select bill of material right here. I have to now select my drawing view because this is what's going to drive the information inside of my bill material. And now I'm back again to all of those properties that we just looked at. I now click OK. And now I can drag and position this bill of material on the screen, and I'm going to just resize it a little bit so it fits a little bit better and bring it over. And there you go. I've inserted a bill of material onto my drawing and I've also have the ability to go in and see what those various properties are and edit them.