Whenever an assembly has new items added the Bill of Materials on its drawing also has new rows and item numbers added. This can create a jumble of balloons with non-sequential item numbers that can be a little confusing.

New in SolidWorks 2013 is the ability to resequence existing balloons to create cleaner, easier to read drawings.

To use this new functionality:

- Add new balloons to your modified assembly view.

- Select the Auto-Balloon command.

- Select the ‘Edit Balloons’ checkbox if it is not already selected.

- Select the drawing view to update.

- Select the ‘Resequence Existing Balloons’ option to resequence the existing balloons.

There is also an ability to replace the balloons which switches the AutoBalloon PropertyManager to use the interface shown when initially creating balloons for a drawing view.

Drawing paper size can be limited by printing and/or other logistical constraints.  Therefore splitting and moving a Bill of Materials to gain paper space is great, but sometimes you want to put your entire Bill of Materials on it’s own sheet.  In SolidWorks 2011 and prior in order to generate your Bill of Materials you had to select a view from the current sheet and then, if necessary, move it to a blank sheet.  But now as of SolidWorks 2012, we can first insert a Bill of Materials onto a blank sheet and then specify the view (containing the assembly) to create the table from.

In order to do this, simply switch to a blank sheet on your drawing and then use the drop down menu Insert>Tables>Bill of Materials.  At this point you can select a view from the drawing FeatureManager tree, which can be a view from another sheet, to create the Bill of Materials table.

When making an assembly drawing, it may not take long before the Bill of Materials does not fit on one sheet.  In order to accommodate the entire BOM we can split the table and move portions of the table to different sheets of the drawing.

Decide where you want to split your BOM, and simply right click on that cell and specify Split.  You will have 4 options here:
*Horizontally Above – To split the BOM above the Cell/Row selected .

*Horizontally Below – To split the BOM below the Cell/Row selected.

*Vertically Left – To split the BOM to the left of the Cell/Column selected.

*Vertically Right – To split the BOM to the right of the Cell/Column selected.

After that you can drag the split BOM table to the drawing tree and drop it onto the sheet you wish to move it too.

Note:  You could also drag the split BOM table onto the appropriate Sheet Tab at the bottom of the window.

Your other option is to select the BOM table and use Edit>Cut (CTRL-X) and switch to another page and use Edit>Paste (CTRL-V) to move it onto that sheet.