Tip: How to optimize OpenBOM view if your BOM has too many columns
In many ways, we designed OpenBOM to be similar to Excel or Google Spreadsheets. There is a very good reason for that. We wanted OpenBOM to be as simple and easy to use as possible. However, there are some situations when Spreadsheets can get ugly and unyielding.
One of these situations is when your BOM contains too many properties and the grid gets too wide with too many cells. Horizontal scrolling was a pain in early versions of OpenBOM. We learned more from users and designed an “Info panel” — a more convenient way way to show the list of properties for a specific part. You can scroll down — we think it’s pretty intuitive.
The “info panel” helps create an improved user experience and also helps OpenBOM better visualize heterogeneous records. That last point is especially important when different parts in your BOM might have different set of properties as usually happens with multi-level BOMs. Another situation is when you extract a large set of properties from a CAD system but don’t need to see all the extracted properties in the BOM grid.
In today’s blog, I want to show how you can use the “Info panel” and use “View configuration” to eliminate properties from the grid without actually deleting them from your BOM.
Here are the few steps involved:
1. Open a BOM and click on (#1) the “Info panel” button on the toolbar and then (#2) click on the “View configurations” button.
2. Configure the properties you want to see and the properties you want to hide.
3. Apply changes by clicking “Save”. The resulting BOM only shows the selected properties. The remaining properties not visible in the BOM are indeed visible when you click on a part and view them in the “Info panel.”
You may probably wonder what the difference is between BOM properties and Item Properties? I will talk about it tomorrow and explain the OpenBOM core data model that differentiate between object and link properties. Stay tuned.
Conclusion.
I hope you found OpenBOM view organization technique useful. However, if you have ideas and suggestions how to improve, don’t hesitate to reach out me via email — oleg @ openbom dot com. We are always open to explore new ideas. OpenBOM is updating every 3–4 weeks and there is a good chance your ideas will be implemented in the next production update.
Best, Oleg
PS. Let’s get to know each other better. If you live in the Greater Boston area, I invite you for a coffee together (coffee is on me). If not nearby, let’s have a virtual coffee session — I will figure out how to send you a real coffee.
