BOM Magic – The Quick Resize Trick

As a designer, you want to spend most of your time designing, not drafting and this is one of the reasons you chose SolidWorks as your main design tool.

As you are approaching the completion of your current project, you already took advantage of all the goodies inside SolidWorks and created amazing models and perfect assemblies. When you got to the boring part of creating the drawing, SolidWorks did most of the work for you generating and detailing drawing views almost automatically. Inserting the Bill of Material took you just 2 seconds. You are happy, you will meet the deadline with time to spare!

There is only one thing that frustrates you. The Bill of Materials does not look as good as the rest of your drawing (see Fig. 1). The rows have different heights and give the appearance of poor drafting skills.

Fig. 1 – Messy BOM

Is there a quick way to re-size the whole BOM in bulk?

Step 1: Drag the border of any row to the desired height. Keep pressing the left mouse button.

Step 2: Press the <SHIFT> key on your keyboard

Step 3: Let go of the left mouse button

Step 4: The BOM has been resized to the desired row height (Fig. 2). You can take your finger of the <SHIFT> key at this time.

Step 5: Now you are really, really happy!

Fig. 2 – Resized BOM