SolidWorks Electrical : Importing Components from a Bill of Material

Shao Liu regularly contributes to the documentation for our Electrical Team here at Javelin Technologies. The article below is a useful section from his work.

The import wizard in SolidWorks Electrical allows for bulk loading components with ease.

Under Manufacturer parts manager select Import.

Then select data source from either an Excel file or a text file.

Since excel is a common format for most of Bill of Material, an excel file is selected in this case. Once the file is selected, the field will be displayed in the same fashion as in excel. User will be able to browse through different sheets.

When defining data range, make sure the “Part” is selected on the left side.

Title row is usually the first row of the sheet, SolidWorks Electrical can take account the title into the configuration so that titles will not be mixed with import data. Simply increase the title row number, then the titles will be in bold font.

Defining field data is a simple drag-n-drop procedure where user drags the attribute to the correct column. Once the attribute is dropped in the column, a check mark will appear next to the attribute indicate column has been defined with that attribute.

Last but not least, data comparison is performed before importing, since the data listed to be processed will be compared to the software data, so that before validation user can know which elements will be created and updated. A report is generated for the user after Compare button is selected. Then user can import by clicking on the same button to import.

Now user will be able to see imported parts in the library. Also the user has the option of saving the configuration so that when a similar table is inserted next time, data range, number of title rows and field definition will be applied in the same manner.