Change "Item" from number to alphabetical

[lctilley]

Does anyone know if it's possible to change the "Item" so that it uses letters instead of numbers?

[4donwan4]

Inside the Inventor Assembly BOM it cannot recognize letters. You might want to post this in the Ideas forum to be considered for a future release.

Regards,

Don

[stephengibson76]

create a parts list, double click to edit it, replace the item numbers with letters, the baloons should update...  Not sure you can save these back to the iam bom but I dont like that anyway in case you bom up the same assembly in another drawing

[lctilley]

Ok, let me try this again. We are just implementing Inventor and want to use the ballooning for our labeling our parts. The probem is that they have always "piecemarked" everything with lower case letters and they want to keep doing that if at all possible. I couldn't find a way to do that inside Inventor. I was reading about someone else who wanted to do the same thing in Solidworks and ran into the same problem. Someone suggested to them that they get a specialized font that would replace the number with a letter. For example: 1 = a, 2 = b, 3 - c, etc. I was thinking and hoping I could take the romans font and save it out as a new file and try to figure out what part of it created which characters and cut paste until I had it the way I wanted. Then I would use it to create a new text style in inventor and edit the text style for the text in the balloons. Any help, suggestions, at this point even a funny joke would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

lctilley

[mcgyvr]

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@lctilley wrote:

Ok, let me try this again. We are just implementing Inventor and want to use the ballooning for our labeling our parts. The probem is that they have always "piecemarked" everything with lower case letters and they want to keep doing that if at all possible. I couldn't find a way to do that inside Inventor. I was reading about someone else who wanted to do the same thing in Solidworks and ran into the same problem. Someone suggested to them that they get a specialized font that would replace the number with a letter. For example: 1 = a, 2 = b, 3 - c, etc. I was thinking and hoping I could take the romans font and save it out as a new file and try to figure out what part of it created which characters and cut paste until I had it the way I wanted. Then I would use it to create a new text style in inventor and edit the text style for the text in the balloons. Any help, suggestions, at this point even a funny joke would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

lctilley

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Need a bit more detail..

Are you saying that (for example) screw1.ipt is commonly referred to as "a" in your system and screw2.ipt is "b" ,etc..? 

Is screw1 always "a" or will it ever be something else? 

I'm not sure I understand at all what this piecemarking is either... 

There are tons of fields that can be used in Inventor..

see image..

I simply used the stock number iproperty for each part in the assembly and set it to a lower case number..

Then I edited my parts list to remove the item number column and replaced it with the stock number column..

[mcgyvr]

and since you wanted "Item" as the column heading you can also edit what it displays so it says "Item" instead of "Stock Number" even though its still pulling the stock number iproperty..

[mcgyvr]

In addition to my 2 posts above..

Its really going to come down to how you "piecemark" these items..

IF a single part used in multiple assemblies is not consistently "piecemarked" as "a" and could be "b" or something else in another assembly then you are screwed as thats a highly manual process.. (which seems like a silly process anyways IMO.. but I'm just assuming I know what you are doing anyways with this piecemarking"

Inventor really has no "magical" way to know what this part might be in another assembly.. It requires consistency to function..

A parts part number is always that part number.. A parts material is always that material,etc... 

So yes.. please explain more detail about how this piecemarking works..

But I'm sure something can be done in Inventor... as long as your process is consistent with lettering.. 

[lctilley]

Mcguvr, thank you for your input. From reading your comment I think your a very good idea as to what we are doing. Piecemarking has always a means of identifying an individual part on both the drawing and BOM. Also, from what you say, it doesn't look that is going to be something that will really work for us. A lot of what we make is custom for each job and yet there are many items that we use job after job with little or no change at all. Creating a part numbering scheme is one of the questions that we are working on right now also. It is our hope to have a continually growing content center that will contain the original part as one number and all of the variances to it as maybe sequential decimal numbers. Who knows? This is new to us and you have helped a great deal in directing me away from something that could take up many man hours and still come to nothing. If you have anything else please feel free to comment. We welcome all suggestions.

Thanks again

lctilley

[jeanchile]

Ictilley,

I can't elaborate because I'm on my phone while traveling but mcgyvr is pointing you in the right direction. Everything we do is custom and our parts are all labeled with letters and numbers. The trick is to set up a custom iproperty field (ours is called Mk#) that you put the piece mark in, then create a custom ballon style and parts list style that references that field instead of the item field. You can even rename the parts list heading to say something else like he said.

I wish I could do more but this has been discussed on this forum a bunch of times. If you are diligent in searching you should find something.

Good luck!