If you’re going to create a report to list all the parts of a building takeoff, the first thing you have to do is to decide what parts you want to report. Vectorworks will report anything you choose, but it can’t read your mind so you have to design your report. We will be covering worksheets in our workshops in February 2016.
One of the most important uses for worksheets is the ability to automatically count objects in your drawing. For example, you might want to count all of your trees separate from all of your groundcovers. You can set up a worksheet to do just that. As you add trees or groundcovers to your plan, you only need to update your worksheet to have these new objects automatically appear. We will be covering worksheets in our workshops in February 2016.
Topics Covered:
I was making a report to calculate wall areas. I found a new function to calcluate the area of a wall component by its name. =COMPAREABYNAME(C=’Wall-External’, ‘cladding’). You used to be able to find the area of the wall by its component index number, but I like this one much more.
In this session we looked at the report from the earlier landscape session, but the users pointed out that the previous report only look for flat objects which is not much use on a sloping site. So the session took the report from the early session in tried to update it so that it would work with objects on a sloping site.
In this session we wanted to look at the ability to create reports. In particular, the user wanted to look at how to create a report with areas of hardscapes along with volumes of hardscapes.
Intermediate Tip – After you have placed plants, you can count them. Vectorworks comes with pre-made plant schedules that will count all the plants in the design. You can access these from the Tool > Reports > Choose Schedule… command and place them anywhere in the drawing.
Check the spelling of your worksheets. When you select a worksheet you cannot use the right-click (contextual) menu to check the spelling. But you can go to Text on the menu bar and choose Check Spelling from there. This command checks for your worksheet looking for spelling mistakes. If it finds words that you know are spelled correctly but not in the dictionary, Vectorworks will show these words as misspelled. If you add these words to your dictionary, Vectorworks will use them from now on.
If you count objects with information attached, Vectorworks will automatically add new objects to the worksheet that have the same record format attached.
You can use the worksheet to edit objects in the drawings and you can use the worksheet to locate the objects from the worksheet.
This exercise shows you how to count items that have information attached. This same technique can be used to count anything that has information attached, such as plants, doors, hardscape areas and so on.
Now the worksheet is nearly done but at the moment it will not print on the drawing. You have done all the calculations that you require so you can close the worksheet window by clicking on the close button on the title bar of the worksheet.
We have not yet told Vectorworks how or where to get the information from. The site boundary and the house polygon have been named so we can use this to get information from the drawing into the worksheet.
Worksheets in Vectorworks are very powerful and can be programmed to search for information in different ways. You can search for information by pen colour, weight, line style, class, layer, kind, etc. You can even search for named objects.
Continuing on with last month’s project, we looked at using Vectorworks’ Wall Framer, creating a truss roof, adding a new tool to Vectorworks, creating a truss roof using a 3D object and adding prices to materials to get a total cost.
This was a session that started to look at reporting materials. Starting with simple walls, we looked at how to report the areas and materials from them. Then we created more complex walls and looked at how to report the different materials from the walls.
This session looked mainly at the plant database, planting, databases and worksheets.
Vectorworks is very powerful when it come to reporting and scheduling, but before you can use these concepts, you have to understand what they mean.
Worksheets allow you count and schedule items in Vectorworks. For example you can count all the trees in a site, schedule all the doors on a particular floor of a project, count up and schedule even find the weight of a bracket in a 3D model. Worksheets are an underused area of VectorWorks and this workshop should open your eyes about what you are able to do with them.
Worksheets – Worksheets allow you count and schedule items in Vectorworks. For example, you can count all the trees on a site, schedule all the doors on a particular floor of a project, count up and schedule even find the weight of a bracket in a 3D model.
The purpose behind these special interest group meetings is to cover a range of topics that might be slowing down the attendees. In the session we looked at worksheets, how to put window so that it suits a stair landing, how to use layer colours, how to texture a floor and how to use the attic in a roof.