Context: I'm developing our engineering process that involves SW, ERP, and nesting software. We have several thousand materials to choose from to assign to our parts. The master list of these materials are in a spreadsheet that can easily be filtered for available color combinations and stock sizes. This list also is used to generate the SW material library. I have that part figured out. The SW interface to the material library doesn't have any search capability, so browsing through a couple thousand materials can take some time.

What I want to do is update the SW registry keys that hold materials in favorites list from excel, then have that immediately reflected in Solidworks. I've found the registry keys, and am confident I can update those from excel.

Problem: I can't figure out is how to get SW to refresh the material favorites list (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Solidworks\SOLIDWORKS 2018\Material) without restarting SW.