How To Create a Simple Design Table

Wednesday, 23 June 2010 08:03

This tutorial will show you how to create a simple design table linked to a CATPart. Design
tables are used to drive parameters in Catia from either a Microsoft Excel sheet or a text
document. Once that is achieved, we are then able to catalogue the different configurations to
be used in a design, but we'll cover that in a later tutorial.

From my experience, Catia releases earlier that 18 have compatibility issues with Excel
because of the file structure changes from 2003 to 2007. If you're using Catia R18 or up, use
Excel, but if you're using an older release of Catia and Excel 2007, rather use text documents.

For this example we're going to make a catalogue of piercing punches and I'll try and keep it
simple. Before we begin just make sure that Parameters and Relations are enabled under To
ols->Options->Part Infrastructure
on the
Display
tab.

DESIGNING THE PART

- Create a new part by clicking on File->New or clicking on the New icon. Remember to
save your model.

- I use parameters to link dimensions to design tables because they are much more user
friendly and easier to troubleshoot. So to do that, click on the Formula icon
which will bring up a dialogue box where we can add our parameters.

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- Next to "New Parameter of type" out of the drop down list choose "Length" and then click
on the button. You have now created a new parameter of the "length" type basically meaning
anything that can be measured in millimetres, or whatever your unit settings are in options.

- Edit the name of the parameter using the text box above the button and type in "Height"
as the name and
"70"
as the value and then click on
"Apply"
. We now have a parameter "Height" with a value of 70mm.

- Follow the steps above to make 2 new parameters, "Body_Dia" with a value of 10mm
and
"Pierce_Dia"
with a value of
8mm
. You should now have the following:

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After the parameters are entered we want to use them in our design so that we can later link our
design table to our parameters.

- Create a new sketch on the YZ plane and create and dimension the following geometry

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CREATING THE DESIGN TABLE

Now that our part is done and our part is parametric to our parameters we want to create a
design table to document all the different dimensional configurations for this part in a
spreadsheet and link them so that the spreadsheet controls the parameters of the part, if that
sounds complicated, don't worry, it's not.

and- name
Click on thedesign
your Design Table
table icon
"Punches", select "...with current parameter values", orientation v
ertical
(this is the spreadsheet orientation, vertical being values going down instead of across)

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- After you click OK a windows pops up and you must now specify which parameters you'd
like in the design table. Choose "User parameters" out of the Filter drop down list,
multi-select our 3 parameters (use
CTRL or SHIFT) and click on the arrow showing right.

- Click OK and tell Catia where to save the file. At the bottom you can specify which type of
file you'd like to save it as, we're using an Excel sheet for our part.

In the background Catia has now created an Excel sheet in the directory that you specified
and has inserted our parameters in the first row in the sheet. In the next row Catia has inserted
the values of our parameters. On Catia you will see our design table with 1 line of configuration
data. We now have to edit the Excel sheet to add our additional configurations.

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and- type
Click
inon
the"Edit
correct
table..."
columns
and it will open your Excel document that contains our parameters

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