Excel Spreadsheets on a drawing

[hitt0006]

I am having issues pasting an Excel spreadsheet on a drawing. The spreadsheet is a list of about 100 bill of materials items. When I paste it on the drawing, the list gets cut off at about Item 45. When I double click on the list in the drawing, the Excel sheet still shows all 100 items. Why would only 45 items show up on the drawing?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

I know I'm going to regret this but ... why are you using a manually created Excel BOM into a drawing? Why can't you use the SW BOM, or at the very least the Excel BOM.

 

[hitt0006]

I admit I am a fairly new SW user, but I've been told to stay away from the SW generated BOM on very large assemblies. I tried the SW Excel BOM, but that also cuts off. Have you seen this before?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

100 items is not "very large".

Save yourself a load of time and hassle and try the SW BOM. I'm betting you will be pleasantly surprised. And I'm willing to bet that the (ex-ACAD ?) person who told you to stay away from it will also (begrudgingly) be surprised.

IMO, using a manual BOM is a ludicrous waste of time with todays MCAD software.

 

[fcsuper]

In my experience, using OLE is to be avoided if at all possible. I suggest to try to use native features within a software package before trying to paste in objects from other software. Reason is the inserted objects can act unpredictability and can make your files easy to corrupt and more unstable when open.

To echo CBL, 100 items isn't a large assembly. And I would be more afraid of a manual Excel object with 100 entries than I would be afraid of a SW generated BOM with 10000 entries.
Just my two cents.


Matt
CAD Engineer/ECN Analyst
Silicon Valley, CA
sw.fcsuper.com
Co-moderator of Solidworks Yahoo! Group

 

[FiveOJester]

I have experienced similar issues with Excel tables in Solidworks. It seems to have a size limit that can't be overcome. I had a table about 20 columns wide and could not for the life of me get it to show more than the first 15. Played with table width, font size, scale, etc. Finally inserted the table a second time and lined it up with the first one.

Ever since we switched from AutoCAD to SW I've LOVED the BOM feature. Probably saves us 4-5 hours a week that used to be spend updating BOMs. Had a few drawings with well over 100 line items. No issues at all, especially in 2006 when they gave you a lot more control over the formatting.

 

[sldwkmin]

As other have stated. Try the BOM functionality. You will be pleasantly suprised I'm sure. As for the file being cut off. Paste the same file into another Microsoft application such as word. If the file demonstrates the same behavior in Word as in SolidWorks it is an OLE limitation causing your situation.

Cole M
CSWP, CSWST, CSWI, CPDM
SW06
SW07
HP XW4300, 3.4g proc, 2.5g RAM, ATI Fire GL 3100

 

[ctopher]

Double-click on the Excel BOM, resize by dragging the handles, save, close. Within SW, drag the handles to resize.

Chris
SolidWorks 07 3.0/PDMWorks 07
AutoCAD 06
ctopher's home (updated 04-21-07)

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

FiveOJester ... edit the viewing size (for the drawing) using the Edit Table option when in the model.