I do many drawings where I have a very large assembly of the entire job and want to detail just a few items that are added to the overall assembly. I need to reference the entire assembly to show dimensions for where they are located. These parts are usually simple brackets or purchased parts that need a location in the overall assembly. I end up with ballons on maybe 10 parts in my assembly with hundreds of parts. I end up with a bill of materials listing many parts that are for reference only. For the bill of materials manually hiding or deleting the rows of parts that are for reference only is very time consuming. Also there are times when something is later added or changed with the reference parts and this changes the BOM when I don't want it to.
Using configurations by going to the assembly to click the "exclude item from BOM" in the properties seems like much more work than this should take. Also I need multiple drawings that show different items added to the overall assembly. The items excluded on each drawing vary and I'd need a different configuration of my assembly for each drawing just to manage the BOM.
I'd like a way to automatically exclude any parts/subassembiles on the bill of materials that are not ballooned in the drawing view on the drawing. This would save much time and hassle over the other methods. How do I do this?
Welcome to the forum. I'm not aware of any way to do that directly, but here is a method that shouldn't be too bad. Click on your BOM to highlight it, then click on the three small triangles midway down at the far left. That will expose a column as shown below that will have a small balloon icon in the cell of the parts that have balloons attached. You can Ctrl+select (or Shift+select) the rows that don't have the balloon icon, right-click, and choose "Hide selected" from the drop-down. Before you do that, drag all the rows that do have balloons to the top of your BOM or you will have gaps in your balloon numbers. Please let me know if this helps, or if you have any questions.