Altium Variants In Bill Of Materials

Question

Is there any way in Altium to display/combine the different Variant configurations in a single Excel sheet exported from the Bill of Materials, e.g. have the different variant configurations displayed in different columns sharing the same rows for common components?
So far I have managed to create a BOM from my different variants in different Excel sheets that are grouped via our company item number for each specific component. I then had to manually combine the different columns into a single work sheet. However I found this to be very tedious and error prone. Thus I turned to one of the Excel forums to ask if this was able to be done via some macro. Fortunately they wrote back to me and gave me the following

https://www.excelforum.com/excel-programming-vba-macros/1401779-add-data-to-existing-columns.html#post5803306

However it would be much easier if I could do this directly somehow from Altium - does anyone know how?

Answer 1

I don't think there's a way to get variant information into the BOM output that is cross-referenced that way. The nearest I can think is adding a parameter to all components for each variant, and tracking placement there; the parameter then shows up for any variant being generated, so only one BOM output need be generated. But, I don't think there's a way to reference data from selected variants (i.e. using special strings).

An Excel macro is probably the best, at least for now.

Probably the same thing (as the macro) can be done within Altium via scripting; but I don't have experience with that. Perhaps someone else can offer such a solution.

Answer 2

The final Macro in Excell does the job - please see below. In theory different numbers of columns could be added for the different variants !

https://www.excelforum.com/excel-programming-vba-macros/1401779-add-data-to-existing-columns.html#post5803306