Bom csv output is wrong

Tojan You do not understand the essence of the problem regardless of the choice of encoding when opening the exel file csv you get confusion… All other popular cad such as altium easyeda etc. Perfectly generate XLSX fails… In the case of kicad, do you have to use crutches or do you disagree? There is a general unification between Cad and the creation of bom is no exception. You try to tell me that crutches are great and everyone else does not understand))

Using comma’s as separators in a csv file is about the stupidest thing of the whole format, as most of the world uses comma’s in numbers. Caret Separated Values would have been much better, Or semi colon or whatever. Almost half of the punctuation keys would have been better than that silly comma.

Wikipedia has some points on CSV:

And the Introduction of https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4180 (Dated October 2005) is worth copying here:

Introduction.

The comma separated values format (CSV) has been used for exchanging
and converting data between various spreadsheet programs for quite
some time. Surprisingly, while this format is very common, it has
never been formally documented. Additionally, while the IANA MIME
registration tree includes a registration for
“text/tab-separated-values” type, no MIME types have ever been
registered with IANA for CSV. At the same time, various programs and
operating systems have begun to use different MIME types for this
format.

So overall, it’s just a big mess.

Not really? The mechanism to avoid any conflict is quotes.

Yes, that is a kludge upon a kludge. Quotes also have their place. Their generic use is to keep text strings together. They should not be mandatory just for numbers. And this is very likely the main reason lots of implementations use a different separator character then a comma in CSV files.

JSON is meant to be human readable, yet you have to quote strings because spaces might be interpreted as keys or worse, everything is broken up by commas :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s just the nature of trying to make formats nice and pretty.

For example, some people use the | ascii character for CSV. Except that fails at my company because our production uses | in barcodes which get dumped to CSV as “raw barcode contents” :smiley:

no I discussed the OPs problem with CSVs. If you want to know why there is no XLSX output available, then that is a completely different question then the “problem” OP brought up. But anyway, I will try to answer your question: XLSX output is not there (yet) because nobody implemented it. maybe it wasn’t implemented because nobody until now had a problem using CSVs or for a different reason I don’t know. maybe there is already a bom export script (for schematics) out there which actually does XLSX output, I don’t know and honestly I don’t care enough to research that for you.

if nothing is available you are also free to add a feature request to the KiCad gitlab page. If it gets enough support it will be implemented eventually but keep in mind as a open source project with limited resources compared to most of other CAD projects a lot of prioritization based on the user feedback is happening.

Are you trolling now, or just being obstuse? :slight_smile:
I really don’t care about your bar codes, there is always something when trying to do stuff with ascii (The S-expressions seem to be quite nice though)

Another (similar) thing is the “net tie” “keyword”. How such a double word with a space became to mean something in KiCad is beyond me. But it’s all pissing in the wind, It was a bad decision long ago, and well have to live with it.

Tojan I’m not the only one who would like to get the following… Exel open file bom kicad and that’s it)) You don’t need anything else))) Any alternatives in the form of libreofis ubunta)) makes you suffer more than work

That is terribly shortsighted. First, KiCad is an Open Source program. Some of those Microsoft “formats” have been dumped into some standard, an the only reason that ever happened was because Open Source software was nicely documented and threatened to take over the world. Governments and such really like the Idea of open and documented standards. Even some form of PDF files has been “standardized” (but it stays a horrible format none the less, It was acceptable for it’s original goal, but it’s been abused in many ways as a defacto standard).

And apart from the Open Source thing, although Linux users is a relatively small number of desktop users (I heared about 2%), they all flock around KiCad, and not just because KiCad is a wonderful EDA suite, but also because there is hardly any alternative for EDA on Linux. I won’t be surprised if 20% or so of the KiCad developers are Linux users.

In any case, it is cad for designing electronics and not crutches for opening exel. And so it turns out to repair the soldering iron you need another soldering iron)

then should not any output from the program respect the locale? the strings in the program do. i understand some places use comma as a decimal seperator and period as a thousands seperator. but those are all managed by the locale settings and to out put a “comma seperated value” format should be in “commas”

as someone who tried to open the file in excel it did NOT ask me. nor can i find the option in the program.

Import or export text (.txt or .csv) files - Microsoft Support.

Maybe the solution to the particular issue (the pcb bom is crappy and you should use the schmetic bom maker) is to remove the pcb bom maker. (though honestly i don’t see why it should not be run through the locale converter. that also would solve this as well).

either way something is broken. does not work as described. does not create what it says it creates. THAT was my issue with it. not extracting the data i needed. i did that. it’s text, not hard. dozens of ways to post process text. but it should work as designed. it should do what it says it will do. and it does not. and it has not for years. THAT was why i made this post. especially after seeing a similar post with the same issue that has not been solved.

If I were mean, I would say just “File → Open”. But because I’m not, I say “I happen to have access to Office 365 Excel and it opens the ‘csv’ BOM created by KiCad’s PCB Editor correctly.”

eelik microsoft office 2016-2021 does not open normally. The question is why not add other output file formats as done in other cad

If OP wanted to complain that semicolons were used in a CSV file, yes pedantically it’s a misnomer but that ship has sailed and this is well known Comma-separated values - Wikipedia Lots of things in the world are misnamed. Coca Cola hasn’t used coca for a long time. Columbus did not reach India so American Indians are misnamed.

If the purported problem was Excel not opening it, then the problem cannot be replicated by others.

If the complaint was a BOM export function from the PCB editor that nobody uses then this will be fixed eventually.

So all in all a storm in a teacup.

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Should the BOM generation option be removed from PCB side before the 7.0 release as it’s very confusing to get different result depending whether you use the same command from PCB or schema editor.

lamikr In this case, it is impossible to generate bom if only the project board is available without a scheme, and this is allowed when converting the board from other cad.There is a suggestion to leave this feature only in a separate standalone board module

Good point, I forgot that schematic and pcb editors are not using same shared/common for both input data for generating the bom.