OpenBOM Tech Tips on YouTube: Leveraging Altium Categories Support

Oleg Shilovitsky
Oleg Shilovitsky
2 May, 2024 | 2 min for reading
OpenBOM Tech Tips on YouTube: Leveraging Altium Categories Support

Engineering disciplines are hard and demand complex data structures and techniques to manage them. At OpenBOM, we don’t believe in the OOTB mantra (out of the box) and, instead, believe in building a flexible platform and solutions you can build and configure using this platform. Similar to how many engineers tweaked Excel spreadsheets, we believe that we can provide a unique experience of building solutions using flexible data modeling and deep integrations using OpenBOM. 

I’m excited to introduce a new type of videos – Tech Tips that can help guide you through a very specific topic or scenario. We found video is a great way to communicate with customers in helping to solve specific technical issues. 

Very often, we are getting requests with “how to” questions. We decided to start building a collection of tech tips and share them via a separate YouTube playlist – OpenBOM Tech Tips. This new YouTube playlist is designed to provide practical examples, best practices, and quick “how-to” guides for leveraging OpenBOM effectively in your projects.

So, today, we are thrilled to introduce the first video in this playlist. Today, we’re diving into a specific tutorial focusing on utilizing Altium categories to streamline your BOM creation process.

Video Overview: Altium Designer Categories 

In today’s video, OpenBOM customer success specialist Pedro Branco will guide you through the step-by-step process of creating a BOM with items saved in multiple OpenBOM catalogs using Altium categories. Here’s what you’ll learn:

  1. Setting up a catalog with a specific Part Number pattern.
  2. Configuring categories in Altium for seamless integration.
  3. Reserving Part Numbers using the Get Part Number function.
  4. Generating a BOM and securely storing the data.

Conclusion:

We’re incredibly excited about our new YouTube playlist, which will serve as a valuable resource for OpenBOM users to all our users. The same videos will also be shared on the OpenBOM Community Website – please register in our community. 

Whether you’re new to OpenBOM or an experienced customer, our Tech Tips series aims to empower you with the knowledge and skills needed to optimize your BOM management workflow. Don’t forget to subscribe to the OpenBOM community and our YouTube channel to stay connected and up-to-date with the latest tips, tutorials, and industry insights. Here’s to streamlining your BOM processes with OpenBOM!

If you’re not using OpenBOM yet (it happens), REGISTER FOR FREE and check out how OpenBOM can help you today. 

Best,

Oleg

Related Posts

Also on OpenBOM

4 6
27 March, 2026

This guide explains the product release process in manufacturing – what it is, how it works, and how PLM software...

27 March, 2026

This guide explains how revision control works in multi-level Bills of Materials (BOMs): what it is, why it’s complex, and...

26 March, 2026

Why CAD, BOM, ERP, Excel, and even PLM don’t actually own your product knowledge. Everyone knows who owns CAD. Engineering....

26 March, 2026

Most engineers understand change management the way it’s been taught for decades: you identify something that needs to change, you...

24 March, 2026

Product lifecycle knowledge is not created in a single system or at a single moment. It emerges across discussions, iterations,...

23 March, 2026

Bill of Materials (BOM) management is one of the most critical and most underestimated aspects of product development. In my...

23 March, 2026

If you work with CAD systems—SolidWorks, Altium, anything in that CAD family—you already know the reflex. Something doesn’t add up....

20 March, 2026

There’s a moment every modern product company eventually hits, and it’s usually not pretty. Someone asks a seemingly simple question...

19 March, 2026

After I introduced the idea of Product Memory, one question kept coming up in almost every conversation: “Who actually owns...

To the top