Inclusion of Not Fitted Components in a BOM
Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the Summer 09 release of Altium Designer brings with it the ability to include, in a generated Bill of Materials, those components that are not fitted on the currently chosen assembly variant.
To facilitate this ability, a new option – Include Not Fitted Components – has been added to the Report Manager dialog, used when generating a report such as a BOM or Component Cross Reference.
Use the Include Not Fitted Components option when composing a Bill of Materials to highlight exactly which components are not used in the chosen variant.
Enabling this option will result in the creation of a new column, Fitted. For each component, an entry in this column reflects whether, for the chosen variant, that component is Fitted or Not Fitted. By default, this column is visible (as the left-most column), sorted and grouped. This causes all Not Fitted components to be grouped together at the end of the BOM – after all Fitted components.
Enabling the option adds the Fitted column – enabling you to quickly browse those components which are Fitted or Not Fitted.
The value entered into the Quantity column for a Not Fitted component is zero (0).
Example BOM Template
The Excel template file BOM Variant Template.xlt has been added to cater for the Fitted column. This file can be found in the \Templates folder of the installation.
Example Bill of Materials generated using the Excel template file, BOM Variant Template.xlt - included as part of the Altium Designer installation.