Bom

You’ve spent an hour adding custom properties to each cut list item — part numbers, supplier codes, cost-per-unit. You modify a structural member, hit Rebuild, and they’re gone. Not obviously corrupted. Just attached to the wrong items, or pointing at stale folders that no longer exist in the tree. This is the cut list auto-update problem, and it’s not a bug. It’s the expected behavior of a consolidation system that doesn’t know you cared about those specific folders. ...

A question on r/SolidWorks last week: can you make flag note ⑤ in a drawing appear automatically in the BOM cell for line item 1? The answers suggested balloons, linked notes, and custom properties — all partially right, none complete. SolidWorks does not have a native mechanism for this. What it has is a custom property workaround that approximates the result, with specific limitations that trip people up. What flag notes are (and are not) A flag note in SolidWorks is a drawing annotation with a bordered symbol — typically a circled number like ①, ②, ③ — stored in a flag note bank. You create them via Insert → Annotations → Note, check Flag Note, and assign a border shape and symbol from the PropertyManager. Once created, a note can be added to the bank with Add to Flag Note Bank, making the symbol reusable across sheets. ...

To export a SolidWorks BOM to Excel, you have three paths — and choosing the wrong one is how you end up maintaining a 200-line macro for two months before admitting it doesn’t quite work. A post on r/SolidWorks showed exactly that: a macro that exported an assembly BOM to Excel with description, material, length, thickness, quantity, and supplier data. It mostly worked. Six comments later, nobody had a better answer than “looks fine to me.” The approach was fine — the architecture was wrong. ...

A recent r/engineering thread on EBOM-to-MBOM translation collected 134 upvotes and 81 comments. The answers split into two camps: “PLM would fix this if companies actually deployed it properly,” and “our team of eight doesn’t have budget for PDM let alone PLM.” Both responses miss the same root cause. The problem starts in how SolidWorks generates an EBOM and what that structure cannot express that manufacturing requires. What SolidWorks Actually Gives You When you insert a BOM table into a SolidWorks drawing or export one from an assembly, you get a direct reflection of the assembly tree. Each component becomes a row. Sub-assemblies appear as parent items with children. Quantities are instance counts. ...

You build a steel frame as a weldment in one part file. Twelve identical 1500 mm long pieces of 50x50x3 square tube, plus eight 800 mm cross braces of the same profile. The cut list folder shows the right rollups: the long pieces grouped under one folder, the short pieces under another. The properties match. Then you drop the part into a parent assembly with a few other weldments, drop a BOM on the drawing, and the cut list items from the second weldment refuse to combine with the matching items from the first. Same profile. Same length. Same description. Different rows. ...

SolidWorks PDM is doing what it was designed to do: managing file versions, controlling access, and keeping your CAD data from becoming a chaotic mess of part_v3_FINAL_real_final.sldprt files. Most teams that implement it see immediate benefits in file control. But then the engineer emails the shop floor a DXF with a hand-typed filename. Procurement is working from a BOM that was exported two weeks ago. The fabrication team has a different quantity listed than what’s in the current assembly. PDM didn’t prevent any of this. ...