Bill of Materials Overview

You can insert a Bill of Materials into drawings and assemblies.

A drawing can contain a table-based Bill of Materials or an Excel-based Bill of Materials, but not both.

The table-based Bill of Materials is based on SOLIDWORKS tables and includes:

  • Templates
  • Anchors
  • Quantities for configurations
  • Whether to keep items that have been deleted from the assembly
  • Zero quantity display
  • Excluding assembly components
  • Following assembly order
  • Item number control
  • Ability to open parts and assemblies from the table. (Right-click a row and select Open <model>.)

You can specify a starting Item Number, then set the Increment value by which the item numbers will increase.

You can change the text in any cell by double-clicking and editing on screen (the pointer changes to when you hover over text), but if you edit data generated by SOLIDWORKS (Item Number, Quantity, and so on), you break the link between the data and the Bill of Materials. SOLIDWORKS warns you when editing a cell can break the link between the cell and the linked property. If you break a link, you can restore it by deleting the cell contents.

You can include detailed weldment cut lists in BOMs.