EXPORTING BILL OF MATERIAL

[basicyrules]

HELLO ALL,

SO I'M WORKING IN INVENTOR 2012 AND WHEN I GO TO EXPORT A BOM INTO AN EXCEL SPREADSHEET IT PUTS AN APOSTROPHE IN FRONT OF EVERYTHING THAT GETS EXPORTED, PART NUMBERS, DESCRIPTIONS, ETC. ANY HELP WOULD BE APPRECITATED.

THANKS,

[ASchlaack]

I'm not sure what exactly is causing this but I do know that your issue is a function of excel not Inventor...

[basicyrules]

thanks for replying but I've changed several settings in excel that could be causing the issue. However, I still believe the issue is on Inventor's side, this same process was working just last week, I didn't change anything in Inventor or Excel, would you have any other suggestions?

[ASchlaack]

No, that was my only idea.. Sorry I couldn't help out more. Best of luck though!

[blair]

Try the BOM Extractor from Charles Bliss

http://www.cbliss.com/inventor/iCode/index.htm

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! Could you try the following test on your machine?

1) Export the BOM table as txt file and csv file.

2) Open the txt file in Notepad. Is there apostrophe?

3) Open the csv file in Excel. Is there apostrophe?

If yes, plesae post the Inventor files here or send them to me directly (johnson.shiue@autodesk.com).

Many thanks!

[jeanchile]

I know this likely isn't going to help much but we do this on almost a daily basis (4 years now) and we've never had apostrophes show up in our Excel files.

[basicyrules]

so I exported it as a csv file, the aposrophes disappeared, but with how we name our parts Excel splits up the names of the parts into two separate cells when it needs to be one. So I don't know if that means it's an excel problem or an Inventor problem. Thanks, 

[ASchlaack]

When it splits them are they still next to eachother? If so you could rather quickly go through and use the merge cells function in Excel.

[basicyrules]

It takes the first part of the title and puts it into one cell, then the rest of the title into the cell next to it, while the merge cell function would be useful for short-term, we are looking for a more permanent resolution to this.

[ASchlaack]

Can you post the file on here? I've never seen this issue but I've had ones like it

[jeanchile]

If I remember correctly the apostrophe in Excel is a quick way to format a number, or a string of text with a mathmatical operator in front of it, as "text". So if I wanted this string of text: +12345 to show up in a cell with the plus symbol I can put an apostrophe in front of it '+12345 so that it will show up and be formatted as text.

This may not help you very much becuase it doesn't identify the source of the issue but if your part numbers have symbols in front of them (#12345-67890) then that may be why they are coming in with the apostrophe. I just don't know who is adding the apostrophe, is it Excel or IV?

As someone stated earlier, using the =CONCATENATE function combined with possibly the =RIGHT function in Excel you could easily get all of this stuff correctly into new columns. A simple work-around for the moment while we all try to help figure this out.