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.
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.
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:
The first thing you need to do is to rename a save the 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”
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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