SOLIDWORKS Electrical: Customizing Simple Reports – Part 1

As you may already know SOLIDWORKS Electrical uses a SQL database to contain and maintain all our Electrical data and information. This has many benefits speed, resilience, multiuser working to name a few but one of the primary features is that the database can be interrogated to present the information it holds and present it how you want to see it.

By now I am sure you have explored the many reports that ship as standard with Electrical, if not these can be found in the report manager project/reports/add.

SOLIDWORKS Electrical reports

When you check out the list you may notice the report title either end in _Imperial or _Metric this is due to the reports being “unit aware”. So you may need to save a report twice to make it available for both unit systems

If you can’t find a report that meets your needs you will need to either customise an existing report or create your own.

Go to Project/Configurations/Reports

Go down the list of reports and choose the report closest to your desired output highlight it and choose to make a copy.

Project/Configuration/Reports

Important: Only edit a report directly if you are sure you do not want to keep it.

You will be asked if you want to edit the new configuration say yes:

Configuration

The first thing you need to do is to rename a save the new report:

Saving a new report

Ok we can now change how the report looks in drawings and what data is used.

First let’s choose the overall look of the report. Select the style tab and you can now choose the fonts for the title, header, content and the totals, remember we are working on an imperial report hence the text height is in inches e.g. 0.1”

Report style

You will, I am sure, notice that as you make changes the preview at the top of the screen updates to reflect the changes.

We can now choose what data is to be displayed and how:

Display

When the SQL query was written by SOLIDWORKS they did not just include the basic information for the report, they thought of what other data a user may want to include and made that available as well. To include it in the report simply tick the selection box.

It’s simple to reorder the data by highlighting what you wish to move and using the arrows at the side to navigate.

SQL query

We can do more formatting of the tables. I will cover this in part two of my blog.

We can now adjust the layout of the report drawing.

Report drawing layout

If you look at the preview my description field is now two wide so I am going to go back to the columns tab and change the description width from 10 to 5, remember don’t forget to choose the apply button.

Adjusting column width

If you have applied the changes we will close the report editor and now open a project a test the report.

In my next blog, I will discuss more about column formatting, how to sort the information and how to apply filters. In my final blog if I am feeling brave I will discuss what happens when you click the expert mode!

By Simon Knibbs, SOLIDWORKS Electrical Specialist

NT CADCAM
NT CADCAM is the UK's most established SOLIDWORKS reseller in England, Scotland and Wales. Offering a fully supported CAD and CAM product portfolio and high levels of expertise internally, makes NT CADCAM unique within the SOLIDWORKS community, giving customers the confidence and assurance they need that their support issues will be dealt with both promptly and efficiently. As a SOLIDWORKS Certified Training Centre, NT CADCAM provides clients with fully certified and accredited trainers who are experienced engineers. NT CADCAM is part of the Solid Solutions Group.
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