John,using your fastners

[moog2]

The company i'm at happens to be using a "Fasteners_Metric.pax" written by you. I'm customising it to our own visualisation, and adding a part drwg ( they like to have them in the part).The problem is with the part preview, some of the screws preview as the wrong type, and don't preview with my visualisation, once saved.
Any normal file previews imediately in it's last saved view.
I'm presuming its prevewing from its initial creation, and you've changed the head type after that, or whatever.
Can i fix this easily, or do i have to re-make a part family member and re-create the spreadsheet as well ??

 

[JohnRBaker]

Actually, the previews of all my fastener master part models were created and saved explicitly, therefore they do NOT use the last saved view. This is set-up and controlled under File -> Properties -> Preview.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[moog2]

Ah, OK, i see why you did it that way, i'll do the same, thanks....

 

[moog2]

my next problem is, i want to change all the text in the spreadsheet to be upper case (for use on the drawing), some of the functions seem to be locked out in the spreadsheet, so i copied it to another file, then edited that, is there a way i can replace the original spread sheet with mine ? I've tried to paste in columns but it crashes when i try that...

 

[JohnRBaker]

You're better off doing a 'cut & paste', even if you have to do it a column at a time, from one Excel session to the other.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[moog2]

that's just it... when i try copy & paste , it crashes the excell and freezes the session(task manager says running). Maybe you could give it a quick go, to see if it's something wrong with my machine

 

[JohnRBaker]

It worked for me. I tested this with NX 5 and MS Office 2003. It's a bit tricky since you have to have both your edited copy of the Excel file open and the NX Family Table master open with the spreadsheet open. While you will see 2 different Excel sessions open in your task-bar, there will only be one Excel window open so you will need to go back and forth by selecting in the task bar. But following that procedure I had no problems copying the contents of a column in the 'external' spreadsheet and then pasting in into the 'internal' copy. Just be sure to save your part family before exiting the external Excel session as that will kill both of them.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[moog2]

my excell is older than that so i'll do it long hand..

Another question, is there an easy way to include a scale attribute, which when i create small screws, will add the scale ( given by the spreadsheet) to the VIEWS in the drawing, which is in the template part of these fasteners.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Do you wish to control the scale of the drawing and/or it's views? Some drawing views can be controlled but I'm not aware of anything that will control the scale of the drawing itself.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[moog2]

yea, its just the view scales i want to alter, as they'll always be presented on an A4 sheet, as a bought in part.
Think i just found it, next to the view scale (in view style) you can pick an expression, i should be able to make that work, but how could i write an equation to link the drawing scale ie: 1:1 to the VIEW_SCALE = 0.5 ?

 

[moog2]

oops, i mean 1:2 = 0.5, 1:1 = 1, 2:1 = 2 ,etc

 

[JohnRBaker]

As I said, I think you can only control view scale and not the drawing. Just assume that the drawing is always 1:1 to go from there.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.