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Refinate Quick Exercises |
QUICK EXERCISES TO GET STARTED (working with assembly lists)
These exercises are oriented toward bill of material lists since they have indexed items which need special attention (e.g. R2-6, quantity = 5). To get started with lists that do not have alphanumeric indexed items, make a new copy of one of your lists using a new filename. In the new worksheet, drag to select cells and experiment with Refinate's buttons. A short help description will pop up whenever you select and apply an action from the action list. Read more details in the Help menu provided. Review the examples and descriptions of procedures throughout the Support area of this site.
To begin the exercises, bring a bill of materials into Excel or else type some reference designator text (delimited by commas) into several cells in one column.
1a) For this exercise, enable Count Ranges. If you have a list of reference designators in one column, drag to select them all and click Get/Test. In Refinate's display, the total count is shown and all reference designators are displayed as hyphenated ranges where breaks in the ranges indicate unused reference designators. Duplicates found or syntax problems will be displayed.
1b) Try the same procedure but this time enable Ignore Ranges. If you have hyphenated ranges then the count should be different this time than for the first exercise since the hyphen is now ignored.
1c) Try the same procedure but this time enable Ignore Ranges and Sort/Duplicates. Look at the sorting order. Put a duplicate in the selection and see how it is reported.
2a) For this exercise, enable Count Ranges. Make a blank column to the right of your column of reference designators. Put the cursor at the first reference designator at the top of the list. Choose the Paste_Count option on the Refinate Format display and then click the Paste_V button. If there is an existing Quantity column in your BOM, does it show the same counts as this newly pasted column?
2b) Try the same procedure but this time choose the Paste_Format option. After the new cells are pasted, re-arrange data in one of the original cells. Then insert a new column to the right of the original data and click Paste_V (or Paste->). You will see that the output is always in the same standard format regardless of the input format.
2c) This time enable the Expand Ranges option. Make a blank column to the right of your column of reference designators. If there isn't a hyphenated range in at least one of your original cells, edit one of those cells to add a hyphenated range (e.g. R1-R10). Then make a new list with expanded ranges by clicking Paste-V or Paste->.
3a) For this exercise, enable Count Ranges. Make a blank column to the right of your column of reference designators. In a cell away from your list of reference designators, type the names of some reference designators which fall within one of the hyphenated ranges in your list. While the cell you just typed is selected, click Get/Test to bring into the display those reference designators. This will be the do-not-install list. Choose "Subtract Dsply V" from the drop-down action list. Then select the first reference designators at the top of your reference designator list and click the Apply button. Notice that you now have a completely new list that does not include the parts which were typed into the separate cell. This is how to automatically create entire lists for different assembly versions without having to locate and edit each affected cell manually. Use the Paste_V button to put the new counts in the column to the right of your newly created version.
3b) Use the results of the previous exercise to find the differences between cells. Select one of the original cells that was affected by your do-not-install list and click Get/Test. Then select the cell to its right which should be the result of the previous Subtract Dsply action. Click the Subtract button (the button next to Get/Test). The parts which have no match in the second cell will remain in the Refinate Format Display. While the cell on the right is selected, click Get/Test. Select the original cell on the left and click Subtract. There should be nothing remaining in the Refinate Format Display since all of the same parts listed in the right cell are also listed in the left cell.
Get Refinate for Excel 97 or newer.