Materials List
A Convenient shopping list
In addition to 2D and 3D views, you can also see your design as a lumber list, or bill of materials (see illustration at right). To see the list, click on the Materials List tab or click on the Design View:Materials List menu item. To open a separate bill of materials window, hold down the Option key while clicking.
Many people have requested a means of viewing and printing a shopping list of the lumber needed to build their design. Design Intuition brings you this, and more. Like the Details View, you can use this bill of materials view to select items, and it will show you what you have selected in the corresponding 2D view.
Printing
You can, of course, print this view. That's its original intended purpose. The background colors may not come out well on your printer, so you can fade them to white or almost white by adjusting the Table Colors in the General preferences.
Immediacy
Like other places in Design Intuition, where immediacy plays a strong role, the bill of materials view will respond instantly to changes made to the corresponding 2D view. To see this, open both a 2D and a bill of materials view of the same design. Resize one of the objects in the 2D view. The position of this object in the bill of materials view will shift up or down according to its changing size.
All this immediacy can slow you down if you have lots of objects in your design. To speed things up, check the Go Fast checkbox in the Views banner.
Selecting
Selecting an item or object in the bill of materials will change what's selected in other views or in the Details or Object inspectors. Sometimes this helps you orient.
Similarly, selecting objects in other views or from the Details View, selects the corresponding item in this view. If your selected object happens not to be visible in the bill of materials, the item of the same dimensions is selected. If you expand this item, the selection will be adjusted to select the exact object. Cute? Note that, when you select a group or an attribute elsewhere, the bill of materials will not show a selection -- it doesn't contain any groups or attributes.
Editing
You can edit the names of your objects, right heare in the bill of materials list! It even works correctly when Fully-Qualified Names is checked (see below). Try it, we think you'll like it.
What group owns each object?
Click on the Fully-Qualified Names checkbox. The list will be redisplayed with groups included in the item names.
The Attributes inspector has a checkbox with this same label. They are effectively the same checkbox.
Which items are blocks and which are cylinders?
The column labeled with a circle will contain a circle for each item (red row) that is a cylinder. The rest are blocks. Blue rows are left blank.
Why two colors?
As a simple purchasing list, the bill of materials items in red tell the complete story. By clicking on the triangles to expand items, this list can show every (non-group) object in your design. This can come in handy when you want to account for all your objects.
The blue rows contain objects which are dimensionally identical to the the immediately preceding item in red. Blue rows are mostly empty, as they would otherwise contain identical information that would only distract and clutter.
Occasionally, Design Intuition considers two close numbers to be identical. When this happens, the row in blue will show its dimensions. Although this rarely happens, it tends to happen with larger numbers.
What if a group in my design is really just one piece of lumber?
You can easily tell the bill of materials view to treat a group as a single object. Select the group and switch to the Object inspector. In the Grouped Objects section, check the checkbox labeled "Show as One Object in BOM." The bill of materials window will reorganize itself, displaying this group as a single object.
