Click on "output format" under "appearance" on the right hand side of your screen when you open Active Reports Designer. Click the box, click on "number" and you should see a field for number of decimal places.

Edit to add: make sure you click on the "SZ/STOCK-XYZ " entry first to make sure you are changing the correct field.

With the right vacuum setup, I don't think the part will pull off. We routinely machine plastic as well as other materials using vacuum pressure to hold it with no problems. I have NOT machined a lot of ABS, so take it for what it's worth. But, a simple vacuum chuck makes for a short setup time, and easy change out if it will work for your application.

Sounds like a good application for a vacuum plate. Should be more than enough surface area to hold the part securely.

I suspect it may be the size of the report header field or maybe one of the other ones. You can click and resize any of those fields and tighten the grouping up on all the fields.

Well, I've been working (off & on) with Active Reports for set-up sheets and I'm finally, but slowly, getting somewhere. I have my title page the way I want it and now am working on tweaking the tool list to be satisfactory. I'm having a problem figuring out why the 1st page of the tool list and 2nd page are not located in the same vertical area. The 1st page seems to be spaced down a little bit and the 2nd page is jammed right up below the page header. All subsequent pages are located as the 2nd. The 1st page is the only one spaced down.

 

Any guesses or suggestions?

 

TIA.

Thanks, that gets me going in the right direction.

This has been discussed before.This should get you close.

I'm quoting a part that has 275 holes that are .029 +/-.001 in aluminum. They have to go through about .4". We have a machine that will do 18000 rpm, but I haven't ever used a drill this small on something that has so many holes in it, so I want to make sure I'm not going too slow with it. Anybody do anything similar? What IPR, and peck depth?

I agree with Chris. It's not terrible to cut, but will move/warp on you if your taking a lot of stock off. I've used HSS and carbide on it. Both do fine as long as they're good and sharp. Had to mill some 1/4" thick sheet down to 1/8" and put a bunch of grooves in it. If I didn't take the thickness down in equal amounts on both sides, it would bow up like a taco and would tend to shrink a little.

We opted not to have all the graphics in our setup sheets, but the good thing about the Active Reports is it's customizable, so you can add in images to suit your needs.

Okay.. I have turned the ATP toolbar on so I will have play around with that to see which is more feasable to use. I know I like the graphical views of the tooling set ups, Stock size etc. I dont see that in your report though.

I have attached a copy of the set up sheet that I put together.

I use the Active Reports Designer that comes with the software to do setup sheets. It took a little work to get the hang of the software, but I'm fairly pleased with the result now. You can see an example of my setup sheet here labeled "test".

We were doing the same thing with Excel, but it was too time consuming. This way is much easier and faster.

I am using the default settings for the report.

Using the setting of report/mill which creates the pdf for me.

Hi Don,

Are you using the Active Report setup sheet?

I've just started playing around with producing set up sheets from within the operations manager in X5.

Normally we've just produced Manufacturing Operation Sheets in Excel which does take a bit more time.

Can anyone tell me if there is a way to edit the comments sections in the .pdf file from within Mastercam or will I need a .pdf writer to be able to add comments in these comments sections after I publish the pdf?

Also, given the file size of these pdfs and the one I did is about 550 KB compared to the same info minus the graphics on Excel spreadsheet is only about 50 KB, is there a way to generate these in another format other than pdf?

 

Thanks in advance for the help.

(2) DMG DMU 50 EVo 5 axis

(2) DMG DMU ECOline 5 axis

(2) Sharp 2412S 3 axis

Our VF6 used a .has extension on the end of the programs....

Dang, just noticed the date of the original post

Had a little time to tweak my setup sheets around with some more info my operators requested. It's working for us pretty well so far. Also, as far as getting something going for the tool lists for the tool crib, I ended up setting up another Excel document and importing the XML data directly out of MC using the developer tab within Excel. I'm still doing a bit of manual entry as far as expected tool life goes. This one is still very much in the works.....

also, in tweaking the setup sheet, I uncovered a bug in MC. The holder length isn't being output to the XML file. Contacted MC about it, and it's supposed to be fixed for X6.

test.pdf

XML tool list template.pdf

Ok...I think I have a better understanding of what your after. I haven't done anything with excel within Active Reports before, so I just did a quick search at http://www.datadynamics.com/ These are the guys that are behind Active Reports in Mastercam. I did a search for "excel formula" and from the results it's unclear to me if a formula can be exported. Here's a link that details creating a basic spreadsheet and saving it as an .xls file. The C# code looks straight forward. If you want play around with it a little - I will too and we'll see what we can come up with. http://www.datadynamics.com/Help/ActiveReports6/arWLKBasicSpreadsheetWithSpreadBuilder.html

Cool, thanks man. I'll give it a go later on this afternoon and let you know if I come up with anything.

So you have an excel document for each job/part number then? Active Reports AFAIK doesn't have the capability to read an excel document, but it does have the capability to export an excel document. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. Let's see if we can create a procedure list for this.

 

1 Run your Active Report

2 During this run have it export an Excel Document based on the tools used

3 Include in exported Excel Document formula to calculate quantity based on work order

 

Won't each work order be a little different so that your formula is always changing? For example work order 123 needs one 1/2 endmill per part whereas work order 456 needs two 1/2 endmills per part.

Yeah, there is an Excel document for each part at this point. I save all my programs, setup sheets, and tool lists in a folder for each part number. The tool room can then go and pull the tool list.xls file and enter in the work order quantity and it will generate the number of each tool needed.

So, your procedure above is correct. What I need to figure out is how to calculate the life expectancy of each tool hopefully using the data available within the MC file. With the my current .xls file, the calculation is based in part on how many parts historically we would get out of a given tool for a certain type of operation, and that comes from just what I know we normally get. I'd like to calculate it off of run time, or cubic inches removed, or some other bit of data that I can extract from the MC file. It's got me scratching my head over how to format it, and if I can even get that kind of data out of MC. I may be aiming way high, but I'm hoping where I end up will at least knock a step out of my documentation process.

 

 

Might be...I've been trying to think of how you're using your excel document, and all I can come up with is just for the formulas? Do you have a separate database of job numbers and tooling required, or is everything within the excel document?

As it is now, the excel sheet is a document I generate and save for the tool crib attendant that has a list of tools for a given part number. There is a formula within it that calculates the quantity of each tool needed when the tool crib attendant enters the number of parts on the work order. It isn't linked to any other file. Basically what I'd like to do is replicate that when I run a tool report out of MC. I don't know that even if I get the calculation to function within the report that the function would translate to Excel so she could open it.

I've attached a copy of that setup sheet I'm using, if anyone is interested in it. I'm sure I'll still tweak on it some as I go....

46129_op1.pdf

Thanks, I was hoping i did something wrong and it would work properly, but I guess I'll have to use your solution if that's what it takes.

De Nada. I wasn't able to find a solution I was satisfied with using X4. I tinkered around with having the report call up an outside text file, but that really wasn't how I wanted to go with it.

Yeah, I just add a manual entry note at the end of my operation that has all my setup info for that operation in it.

I ended up making my own template in active reports that had only the info I wanted on it. The one that came with the software had more info than we needed, and wasn't really formatted the way I wanted.

Manual Entry from the Toolpaths?

Yeah, I just add a manual entry note at the end of my operation that has all my setup info for that operation in it.

I was messing with the Active Reports stuff and can't figure something out. When i generate a report, I go to the top drop down and drag the add text annotation onto the screen. I can add text and it shows up on the screen just fine.

Problem is when I save as a pdf, the text does not show up in the document when i open the pdf.

Am i missing something here, or what?

 

Thanks,

I was having the same problem. I upgraded to X5 and use manual entry now with no problems. I didn't realize the problem with X4 until I had done a few setup sheets, then pulled them back up to find all my comments were gone.

Upgraded to X5, and have the setup sheets generating the way I want them to. Success! Sure is a time saver.

So the next project is generating the tool report that has a function within it to calculate the number of tools needed to run a shop order of a given quantity. I have an excel document that does it now, but I would really like to have it ALL within MC. Possible?

It's not a matter of changing the post. As I understand it, there is a file that the post looks for when executed that is tied into your MC software, so anytime you go to a different version of MC, that lock has to be configured for the new version of MC.

Can you share it please. Thrash

 

headhunter, why don't you upgrade the post yourself. I dont think between X4 and X5 any parameters have changed.

I was working on the same thing here. It's not the way I wanted to go with it because I wanted all of my info within the Mastercam file itself without having to access any outside files. So, we're going to go ahead and upgrade to X5. Would have already, but we use a post from a third party that has to be upgraded every time we upgrade MC, and we get hit with an upgrade fee.

I did manage to get this to work. It will popup an Open File Dialog so a user can browse

to a .rtf file. It will also work with a .txt file, but it loses formating.

Thanks for the reply. I'm using X4 at the moment though. Any chance of making that work?

If you have X5 then look in your SST folder for these subreport files.

I haven't used them yet, so you'll have to let us know how they work. Looks

like there are 3 different DataField tags for manual entry.

 

-Setup Sheet (MAN-ENT-DATA).rpx

-Setup Sheet (MAN-ENT-INFO).rpx

-Setup Sheet (MAN-ENT-LIST).rpx

Well, I've pretty much gotten my setup sheet formatted the way I want.....with the exception of not being able to import any manual entry from the Mastercam file. Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks!

Bobby Biggs