Users that need to extend the functionality of PDM BoMs
Many of our Customers have a requirement to re-use Bill of Material (BoM) information outside of SOLIDWORKS PDM. This could be to transfer data to other business systems or simply to create standalone BoM report for inclusion in packaging / build instructions etc. To support this it is possible to ‘save’ a BoM, from within PDM, directly to a csv (comma separated) text file which could then be edited in another application such as Excel, or imported directly into your business system, where the formatting matches the requirements of that System.
SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional also has an ‘Export’ capability which when triggered via a Workflow ‘Action’ allows you to export the BoM to an XML file, either as an attribute list or table. Again, this xml file may be suitable for directly importing into your business system. It is not however possible to automate the export of a csv file, nor is it possible to control the formatting of that csv file by defining an ‘excel’ template to open it in automatically.
For Customers who have a requirement to automatically export Bills of Materials to either a comma (csv) or tab (tsv) separated text file, or who want to create a BoM Report within a formatted Excel spreadsheet the BoM Export Add-in from Solid Solutions can provide this capability.