MS Excel Replacement for Cadence Schematic Capture BOM Creation

Hi,
All engineering EDA and CAD programs have a mechanism to create bill of materials or BOM as they are known as. I use Cadence Design Systems Allegro for circuit design and use it’s BOM creation linking and it calls to MS Excel and automatically formats all of the internal database fields and enters them into columns then opens MS Excel.

My question, is there any chance that the “call” that Cadence Allegro makes to MS Excel can be intercepted by your LibreOffice Calc program?
Chris

by your LibreOffice Calc program

Whom do you address by your. This site is about users of LibreOffice helping other users of LibreOffice. So you don’t address any vendor or the like, since there is none.

From your description it seems to make much more sense to address your question to Cadence Allegro whether it is possible to

  1. call another application? --and/or–
  2. have at least access to the intermediate data of what you call internal database fields ? --and/or–
  3. create a file based export of the data (.csv, xlsx, …) without calling Excel?

Other option is approaching professional support (shameless advertising: e.g. we in Collabora Productivity have some successful projects where our clients needed specific applications using MSO to be handled by LO, and we extended LO code to properly handle the API needed there. That is gradual process, and making LO handle all MS API at once is realistically impossible, but every such project, where customers sponsor the improvement for everyone, makes us closer).

I wouldn’t hold my breath in anticipation of any progress from Cadence. They seem to rely on plugging into Excel API for exports, and do not see the point in doing otherwise, according to this thread from 6 months ago. (While not explicitly stated, I read from that answer an implication that also csv and similar exports would depend on Excel being installed.)

Collabora Productivity, as suggested/offered by Mike Kaganski, may be a better bet than the original vendor if your workflow depends on integration with LibreOffice. This way you also contribute to “the greater good” for the open source community/movement.

For a single seat, a standalone Excel license will probably cost you less, in terms of work expenses as well as time spent. You can set Excel up to use ods format by default, for a smoother integration with LibreOffice.