We are in desperate need of a quick way to locate balloons on a drawing in WF4. I have read http://www.ptc.com/cs/cs_24/howto/fom3447/fom3447.htm which shows how to locate views by zone. I would like to do the same things for every balloon on the drawing, preferably in a table sorted by index number.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
-Nick
No input for your question but "in" for any answers.
I was wondering if I could do the same with the location of datums. On our larger drawings, we have a table that specifies the sheet number and zone of each datum.
If you select the index row in a repeat region BOM, the ballon(s) highlight.
Not sure if that's what you're looking for.
If not, there is no easy answer.
Frank,
Sorry, no, I'm asking for a way to automatically generate a table based on balloon zone locations to be added to the drawing. We have been mandated to add the table, so it will cost quite a few Engineering hours to track down each one of hundreds of balloons to generate a table that will go out of date almost immediately on every drawing. PRO|E seems so close to doing this for views, it would surprise me if this the first time anyone has had to do this task.
To ease the burden of this task, I created a symbol the size of the drawing with a zone grid and in each zone placed large lettering zone labels in a pale colored line/font style. It can go on a layer to hide it so that it doesn't have to be placed whenever you need it.
I felt it was useful to place the symbol early in the creation of a drawing so that it would guide users away from placing items at grid intersections, which makes it difficult to tell which zone an item is in.
The large letters let one zoom in (J-size esp) to read the balloons and not lose track of the zone.
The reason I did this was to populate an Excel workbook that tracked where every part went, what it was for, and where it could be found on the drawing. Being in Excel it was easy to see that all parts were accounted for, where to find them in the drawing, and, see the flag notes that were related. That last bit is handy to make sure that locking compound or torque notes are applied all the places they should be and that each hardware stack had all the items they should have.
I thought of getting more detailed and checking to see that screws/nuts/washer sizes matched...
If you need QA or customer acceptance of a drawing package, showing that everything is accounted for is a big boost and worth the time spent doing so.
Finally, maintenance of the package is pretty easy. Even if a view moves to a new sheet, fill with the new sheet number and copy/paste the new zone.