Bill of Materials

A bill of materials (BOM) may be imported to a component layer from a spreadsheet or a text file. For best results, the outer contour of the PCB should be defined, and pick and place data should be imported, before importing a BOM.

When importing a text file, the file format must be specified. Choose between delimited or fixed-width fields. For delimeted fields, the delimiter character must be specified. For fixed-width fields, click on the ruler to specify the column widths. Note: Ignore the First row headers and Ignore first rows settings. These are managed in the next step.

The Import BOM dialog box is used to convert imported data to the Macaos component structure. The source data is shown in the upper grid and the parsed data is shown in the lower grid.

If the first row contains column headers, then an attempt is made to automatically link columns in the upper grid to columns in the lower grid. If necessary, specify rows in the upper grid to ignore.

The lower grid columns must be linked to their corresponding columns in the upper grid. If the column does not exist in the upper grid, then it should be mapped to column zero.

If a row contains multiple designators, then the separator character must be specified. Otherwise, this field should be left empty.

If a source column has both supplier name and supplier part number (SKU) in the same column, then the separator character should be specified. Otherwise, this field should be left empty.

If necessary, it is possible to add data to individual cells in the lower grid. Simply click on the cell and start typing to replace all text in the cell. Alternatively, click 3 times to place the cursor at the desired position in the text of the cell.

Each row in the Parsed BOM must have a unique designator. A warning is generated if empty or duplicate designator cells are found when attempting to save the imported BOM data.

Click the OK button to import the parsed BOM data.

The designator is the unique identifier for each component. For components which already exist on one of the component layers, the component’s properties are updated with the values from the imported BOM. New components are added to the left of the PCB with 10 mm spacing.

After the PCB has been published, the Assembly Data Manager module may be used to inspect and modify component data, as well as to export PnP and BOM data in various formats.