Drawings Tables Data with Reference

[infoW9XPC]

Not really sure what to search for to teach myself how to do this, so hoping to get some advice and some pointing in the right direction.

I create shop drawings and send for customer approval. I use a simple part schedule on these drawings which help eliminate having to draw every single piece (ie: it's the exact same piece, but in different lengths, so I'll have one drawing, but three parts on the schedule with a different length and weight).

What the customer needs to see is significantly less information than I need to send to my shop for production, and what the shop needs to see is also less than what I want entered into our MRP software for data and tracking purposes.

Right now our process is create the drawings, then I export the schedules to excel and add the additional data that's needed.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to create a "master" schedule from the beginning, which would still just be a simple table, but with all the information needed in total. Then I would like to have the parts schedule on the drawings reference that larger table, but only show the data that's needed, and same thing for what I'm sending to the shop. 

Is there a best practice for this built into Inventor so that I can create it in the same software while I'm creating drawings?

From what I've searched, the best path I can see is to start associating an excel file with every set of drawings, then entering all this data into excel in the first place, and I can have macros or formulas auto "export" the necessary values into different tables in my excel file and all that is automatically pulled into Inventor.

Is there any other method that makes sense? The biggest thing I'm looking for to potentially avoid that method is having to deal with more files and versions (we're not set up with Vault... yes I know it's nice, no I don't have $30k and a lot of time to burn to make that happen right now) to create drawings.

Happy to elaborate if my information is not making sense. Thanks!

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I could be wrong but I suspect iLogic might be the solution you are looking for. Your design is mostly one-off and the reusable parts are pretty stable (no further change pending).

If you don't care about file versioning and capturing variations for each design, you could create a highly configurable assembly using an iLogic rule. The rule can be driven by an Excel table. Once a design is done and documented, you may export it to STEP/dwg to secure the version. Then you can keep working on another variation.

Many thanks!