Renaming a spreadsheet used in a part family?

[LinuxFreak]

Perhaps someone can shed some light on an issue we just encountered. We had a user perform a Save As on a Part Family master in order to create a NEW part family. This was in an effort to break up a large, unwieldy part family into smaller, unique part families. However, the spreadsheet name, which appears in the titlebar of Excel when editing the Part Family spreadsheet, still shows the name of the original part, which may lead to confusion. Is there some way to rename the embedded spreadsheet?

Thanks for any help!

Windows 7-64 / Dual Xeon X5550 / 24GB RAM / Quadro FX3800 / NX 9.0.3.4 MP4 / Teamcenter 9.1.2.7 / Algor 23.1 / ANSYS 15.0.7

 

[TaylorAnderson]

Out of curiosity, did your user actually perform a SaveAs from inside NX, or did they copy the file on the operating system and change the PRT filename?

When I tested this just now, a SaveAs performed from inside NX correctly updated the name of the internal Part Family spreadsheet. Copying and renaming the file in the operating system outside of NX did not.

Of course, there are several little things like this that NX will automatically adjust for you when you let us do the work for you using the SaveAs from inside NX... In fact, another SaveAs at this point (done correctly) would fix this specific issue for you.

...and then always do it that way.

Does that help?

Taylor Anderson
NX Product Manager, Knowledge Reuse and NX Design
Product Engineering Software
Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc.
(Phoenix, Arizona)

 

[LinuxFreak]

Sorry, but I guess I was a bit off on my facts. Upon further review I realized the user created an NX dataset under an old, existing Item Revision in Teamcenter (the part already existed but as an AutoCAD dataset only) and then performed a named reference swap of the existing part family master model into this "new" dataset. He then opened this new dataset in NX to purge all the row items that no longer applied to this particular part number. Hence, the Part Family spreadsheet still maintained the original name (as shown in the title bar of Excel). We originally had a single part family handle all sorts of variations and part numbers, but it grew so large (several hundred rows of data) that it would take 5 - 10 minutes to initialize, if it didn't fail at least once or twice as well! Hence, we wanted to split it up into more manageable part families for more specific parts.

If one cannot rename the embedded spreadsheet, it's not a major problem. We just wanted to avoid causing any other users confusion. But if there IS a way, I'd love to know. Maybe there's something hidden deep inside Teamcenter that an admin can access??

Drew

Windows 7-64 / Dual Xeon X5550 / 24GB RAM / Quadro FX3800 / NX 9.0.3.4 MP4 / Teamcenter 9.1.2.7 / Algor 23.1 / ANSYS 15.0.7

 

[TaylorAnderson]

Drew --

I'm not aware of a way to change this manually. And the Part Family spreadsheet is really NX functionality, and not Teamcenter functionality.

The Named Reference swap sounds like the extension of the manual renaming I described above... I suspect it involved exporting the existing dataset, renaming it, and re-importing under the new item. And again, performing the SaveAs from inside NX to a new item would properly rename everything. But of course, doing the SaveAs into an existing Item (if that's really necessary to your process) may not fly either.

Taylor Anderson
NX Product Manager, Knowledge Reuse and NX Design
Product Engineering Software
Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc.
(Phoenix, Arizona)

 

[RobLN]

I use many Part families for components. When I do a save as (Always administered via TeamCenter) the new part always maintains the old XL sheet name. However this does not seem to have any effect on the outcome of the new part family which functions OK dispite having the old name. It never really bothered me but I also would like to know if it can be changed. The spreadsheets I run can contain up to 1500 lines (child parts) and so far all seems to run / update OK...

Solid Edge; I-Deas 7 to 12; NX4 to NX8.5 / TeamCenter 9.1 & Ansys 14.5

 

[LinuxFreak]

@RobLN you mentioned that your part family spreadsheets can contain up to 1500 lines. I'm curious how you find performance for such a part family. How long does it take for the spreadsheet to initialize? Do you ever have communication failures during initialization or updates?

I am accessing our Teamcenter server over a WAN, through 6 T-1 lines. Bandwidth typically can reach 600 Mb/s with a latency of less than 35ms, but I often have large spreadsheet part families (say, over 100 lines) fail to initialize on the first try. Saving a part family can also take over 5-10 minutes, or more, for very large ones (>450 lines) and will more often than not, fail on the first try. I get COM errors, suggesting there's too long of a response time between the server and Excel, so the save fails and Excel locks. VERY annoying. Wondering if there's some way to optimize the response time with part family spreadsheets that we're not following.

Drew

Windows 7-64 / Dual Xeon X5550 / 24GB RAM / Quadro FX3800 / NX 9.0.3.4 MP6 / Teamcenter 10.1.3.2 / Algor 23.1 / ANSYS 16.1