When you need to provide a thorough specification of a part's properties you use characteristics. The use of characteristics enable you to create dynamic templates, itemize the part's properties and facilitate the search for the parts to satisfy your needs. Characteristic attributes can be: height, width, diameter, color, material, weight etc. When specifying an attribute you can also define a unit, i.e. m, Kg, cm. In order to search for a part that fulfills your requirements you can use a Best Fit Search method.
A Characteristic template is a class of several attributes both numeric and
alphanumeric. You can assign the class to a part and the template with all its
attributes are copied into the object. After assigning the class you can specify
a value for all attributes in the class.
On completing the characteristics you can approve them by using the menu Change
Status. This toggles the status between Approved and Not Approved. A part with
characteristics cannot be released before the characteristics have been
approved.