Reports, BOMs & References

SphereHarness writes Word, PDF and Excel files itself, exports a bill of materials to Excel and builds an assembly back from one, publishes assembly instruction manuals, and lays out a new drawing to match a reference drawing you already have.

Word, PDF and Excel reports

Ask for a document in plain words and say what goes in it. The AI supplies the content — headings, paragraphs, tables, pictures of the model — and the product's own document writer produces the file. No office software is needed on the PC, and no AI-written code runs.

Create a Word report of this part with its properties, mass and a picture of the model, and save it to C:\reports\bracket.docx

Put the hole table into an Excel workbook at C:\reports\holes.xlsx

Available for: every CAD system on this site.

AutoCAD: PDF documents; Word and Excel are not verified there.

Assembly instruction manuals

From an open assembly, SphereHarness drafts the assembly steps from the structure — identical parts grouped, each step with its own view — and publishes them as a single offline HTML file you click through, and as a Word or PDF manual with a picture for every step. Steps can be reordered, merged or reworded in chat before you publish again.

Publish assembly instructions for this assembly as HTML and PDF

Available for: every CAD system on this site.

AutoCAD: 2D instructions, layer by layer, as the viewer and a PDF.

Bills of materials and Excel

BOM to Excel. The bill of materials of the open assembly is written to an Excel workbook in one of four shapes — all levels, parts only, top level or indented — with the property columns you name.

Export a parts-only BOM with description, part number, material and revision columns to C:\reports\parts.xlsx

Available for: Inventor, NX and Solid Edge.

Assembly from an Excel BOM. Give it a spreadsheet (Excel or CSV) that lists part files, and each listed part is inserted into the open assembly. It adds rows; it does not change or remove components that are already there.

Insert the parts listed in C:\bom\frame.xlsx into this assembly

Available for: Inventor, NX and Solid Edge.

A drawing laid out like a reference

Open a saved part or assembly and choose Drawing from Reference… on the SphereHarness ribbon (or ask in chat), then pick the old drawing as a PDF, a picture, a DWG or a DXF. Each view on the reference is matched against the model, and the new drawing gets a matching view at the reference's scale and position on the sheet. The model has to be saved first; an unsaved one is refused by name.

Make a drawing of this part laid out like C:\refs\old_bracket.pdf

Available for: Inventor, NX and Solid Edge.

Building a part from a drawing, a picture or a mesh is described in Examples; rebuilding features on an imported solid in Feature Tree Translation.