I find it hard to believe I'm the only one that has this issue, but I haven't been able to find any info on it.

I'm coming from using Inventor for many years. One of the things I really miss is Inventor's BOM dialogue box. In the assembly, you click it and up pops a (scrollable) window with the BOM in it as you've formatted it. The dialogue box gave you basic Excel-like control over the BOM. You could print it, export it, change column sizes, custom properties etc..

But, with solidworks, my only options for viewing an assembly's BOM are to:

1) Insert it as a table in the assembly and scroll through a semi-transparent table that is harder to read than a simple white spreadsheet (also, I have to ctrl+pan to "scroll" down the table).

2) Open the BOM in a new window, which presents the same problems as #1, just that I don't have to ctrl+click to pan down the table (still can't scroll, though)

3) Insert the BOM in a drawing.

I really can't believe this is the best that SW has to offer. I've seen what EPDM can do, but that's only the BOM that's currently checked in to the vault. If I check out a document and make some BOM-effecting changes, I'm still stuck with viewing the BOM in the assembly window.

Anyone have any tips?