Electrical design projects are frequently started from a preliminary list of materials. These may come from an existing, similar project or from a material list used to cost estimate a project. This list can be imported directly into Promis.e or Bentley Substation and used in any of the reports such as Job Costing or Purchase orders. This functionality is available by selecting Import spreadsheets into BOM on the BOM Explorer tab of Project Manager. The software will require selection of an XLS file to import from. A mapping dialog allows the user to map the Excel field names to Device ID and symbol text attributes.
Part numbers should be assigned to all of the imported devices. Assignment can be made in the Excel file or after the import in the BOM explorer. If the part numbers exist in the parts database with valid symbols assigned the Insert Symbol By Device ID tool can be used to place the devices onto drawings. If symbols are already inserted, they can be associated with imported devices by right-clicking the symbol on the page and selecting Device BOM Assign.
The Import Spreadsheet function is for a simple one time import of parts. The LT API allows for creating more sophisticated imports through custom programming. Functionality allows the user to define flags to the imported record allowing them to be deleted and re-imported based on specific rules.