Well, my work today has done nothing but reaffirm my belief that bills of material belong anywhere but on the drawing.  The abysmal way SW hs implemented them certainly won't sway me.

I drop the stock built-in BOM on a drawing, tweak it until it looks just right and has all the properties I need.  Perform a 'Save As' to same it as my new handy-dandy BOM template.  Create a new assembly drawing and insert the BOM and SW arbitrarily changes the column widths so that the BOM now overlaps my title block.

Dear SolidWorks:

Which part of the word 'TEMPLATE' do you not understand?

Jim S.