For example, a truss between two poles can resize itself if one of the poles has moved. It can also display itself as a detailed 3D solid model or a symbolic line representation. Components increase design productivity because they can reconfigure themselves automatically after a design change somewhere in the model. Design quality is enhanced because engineers can quickly evaluate various design alternatives to find an optimum solution. Productivity and quality are further enhanced because derived engineering representations such as drawings are automatically generated and kept up to date.
Components also enable the storage of life-cycle information in the model.
A spreadsheet is much more efficient because you can define relationships between the numbers and automatically generate different representations such as a report or a pie chart. In future release, it will be possible to store components in an external database. By using an external database, the user can take advantage of standard database functionality such as spatial indexing, versioning, access control and replication. No, it is still possible to use cells. Cells and components can both be used in a design, but cells do not offer all the benefits of components.