Bill of Materials (BOM) Generation

There are a couple ways to generate a bill of materials (a "BOM") from Expedition PCB. Since a BOM is often represented in the form of a spreadsheet, the easiest method for directly generating one is outlined below. This involves using a pre-built Excel spreadsheet that contains macros so be sure that your security settings within Excel allow macros to be executed.

The steps are as follows:

• Launch Expedition PCB
• Open your PCB layout
• In a separate Windows Explorer window, navigate to C:\MentorGraphics\2007EE\SDD_HOME\standard\examples\pcb\Automation\Excel
• Double click the ExcelCompList.xls file
• When Excel opens, clist "Start" within the spreadsheet.

The above steps should generate a spreadsheet containing the parts that comprise your current project. There is no way to modify the composition or layout of the spreadsheet, though you can of course use Excel to modify it once it is generated.

If you wish to have ultimate control over the composition and layout of your BOM, you must use the Report Writer. This program is available under the menu Output->Report Writer...". The Report Writer exposes an underlying relational database. Once you have opened up the Report Writer, you want to choose "Physical Board Data" to populate your database.

Most of the fields of interest for a bill of materials are found in the Tcomp, TPartNumber, and TPartNumberProperty tables. You would need to use the Query->Interactive Query facility to define the tables and fields within each that are desired as part of your BOM report. Once these fields have been selected you can save the query and ultimately export the report it generated as a comma-separated-values (csv) file which can be opened and understood by Excel.