Including Design Data in an Excel-format BOM
Design data can be passed from Altium Designer into an Excel Bill Of Materials by including special statements in the Excel template used to create the BOM.
When creating the Bill of Materials template in Excel, a combination of Fields and Columns can be used to specify the desired layout. Several example templates are provided with Altium Designer in the \Templates folder of the installation user-files. A full list of available fields is provided below.
Fields
Fields provide project-level information. These are not usually attached to each item in the BOM, but are often used in the header of the document. Fields are used in the format Field=FieldName (e.g., Field=Currency). The available fields are:
- Currency
- DataSourceFileName
- DataSourceFullPath
- GeneratorDescription
- GeneratorName
- OutputName
- OutputType
- ProductionQuantity
- ProjectFileName
- ProjectFullPath
- ReportDate
- ReportDateTime
- ReportTime
- Title
- TotalQuantity
- VariantName
Columns
Columns provide information that is supplied on a per-component basis, and would usually appear on each line in the BOM. Columns are used in the format Column=ColumnName (e.g., Column=Description). Column information can be taken from several sources, including:
- Default component parameters (such as Designator or Description).
- User-defined parameters added to components.
- PCB data.
- Supplier data.
These are discussed separately below.
Default Parameters
The following columns are provided for all components:
- Comment
- ComponentKind
- Description
- Designator
- DesignItemId
- Footprint
- LibRef
- LogicalDesignator
- PartType
- PhysicalPath
- Quantity
- UniqueIdName
- UniqueIdPath
Document Parameters
The following document parameters are available for all components by default. They are obtained from the schematic document that contains the component.
- Address1
- Address2
- Address3
- Address4
- ApprovedBy
- Author
- CheckedBy
- CompanyName
- ConfigurationParameters
- CurrentDate
- CurrentTimeDate
- DocumentFullPathAndName
- DocumentName
- DocumentNumber
- DrawnBy
- Engineer
- ImagePath Index
- ModifiedDate
- Organization
- Revision
- Rule
- SheetNumber
- SheetTotal Time
PCB Parameters
Pick and Place information can also be included from the PCB. In order to use these columns, the checkbox Include Parameters From PCB must be enabled in the Bill Of Materials Report Manager dialog.
- Center-X(Mil)
- Center-X(mm)
- Center-Y(Mil)
- Center-Y(mm)
- Layer Pad-X(Mil)
- Pad-X(mm)
- Pad-Y(Mil)
- Pad-Y(mm)
- Ref-X(Mil)
- Ref-X(mm)
- Ref-Y(Mil)
- Ref-Y(mm)
- Rotation
Supplier Data
In Altium Designer, it is possible to retrieve online data from suppliers and feed that into the BOM. Note that these are updated live and are retrieved when the BOM is generated. Multiple suppliers can be set up for each component.
- Manufacturer x
- Manufacturer Part Number x
- Supplier x
- Supplier Currency x
- Supplier Order Qty x
- Supplier Part Number x
- Supplier Stock x
- Supplier Subtotal x
- Supplier Unit Price x
Custom Parameters
Additional information also can be imported from a database library or from parameters added to components by the user. In these cases, simply use the parameter name as the column name.