Creating a Bill of Materials

A bill of materials is a composite list of all the elements you need for your PCB design. Using the Bill of Materials command, you can create a standard tab-delimited part list, or you can create a custom bill of materials showing properties that you specify. With either of these formats, you can add information about any part by merging an include file with your bill of materials. A standard bill of materials includes the item, quantity, part reference, and part value.

Capture automatically elects to use either instances or occurrences for generating reports, depending upon your type of design. In general, you should use instances for FPGA and PSpice projects, and use occurrences for PCB and Schematic projects.

You can create non-electrical parts—such as screws, washers, and sockets—that will appear in a bill of materials report but not in a netlist because the non-electrical parts do not have pins. Any part without pins is considered non-electrical.

You can specify any header information you want. The header of a bill of materials usually contains information such as the design name, date, document number, revision code, report name, page number, and the time the report is created. If the Header field contains only a single space character, the header is left blank.

To create a Bill of Materials

1. In the project manager, select schematic folders or schematic pages if you want to process only a portion of the design. If you want to process the entire design, leave the schematic folders or schematic pages unselected.
2. From the Tools menu, choose the Bill of Materials command.
   The Bill of Materials dialog box appears.
   Verify that the dialog box options are set the way you want them.
   For example, you specify whether you want to process the entire design or only the selected schematic folders or schematic pages, and the name and location for the report file.
   (If you want to customize the information contained in the bill of materials report, see To create a custom bill of materials below.)
3. Click OK.

To merge information from an external database

1. Create an include file (see Creating an include file).
2. Perform the steps listed in To create a bill of materials section and set these additional options in the Bill of Materials dialog box.
   
   • Select the Merge an include file with report option.
   • Specify a combined property string.
   • Specify the path and name of the include file.

To create a custom bill of materials

• Perform the steps in To create a bill of materials section and set these additional options in the Bill of Materials dialog box:
  
  • In the Header field, enter the column headings you want in the report. If you leave the Header field blank, there are no column headings in the report.
  • In the Combined property string field, enter the names of the properties you want in the report. If you want the property values separated by literals, include the literals in the field. See Defining properties for more information.

To import the bill of materials in Microsoft Excel

1. Select the Open in Excel check box.
2. Click OK.
   The bill of materials is displayed in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Shortcut

Toolbar:

Example

1 Bit Full Adder Hierarchy (COMPLEX) Revised: March 31, 1999 OrCAD
Bill Of Materials March 31, 1995 16:50:31 Page 1