Architosh reView: VectorWorks ARCHITECT

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	Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

MacCAD reView: VectorWorks ARCHITECT - Part 4, page 3

29 May 00

Part 4: Tools for Construction Documents- Continued

Placing ConDoc Notes on your Drawings

Placing ConDoc notes is simple. Once you have finished drawing and placing call out notes on your details, plans and sections you go to the Notes menu and select Place Notes and then select the submenu choice Create ConDoc Notes. The following Dialog box appears. (see below)

In this window you have a number of choices. The first choice is to determine which placed ConDoc note callouts you want organized and gathered in your ConDoc Notes text block. Depending on a number of factors you will choose between the three choices. If you choose "On all layers of the document" it will gather notes placed on every "sheet" in VW ARCHITECT, since ARCHITECT organizes sheets by using layers. This depends on having always placed your ConDoc callouts on the Notes-Sheet class for all of your notes. However, ARCHITECT allows you to do two different things with placing notes. Via the Task Manager you are presented with an option to register a particular note callout one of two ways: Notes Registered to Detail and Notes Registered to Sheet. Both of those options are Classes. Choosing one will determine which Class your note is set in. So if you want a master ConDoc notes list placed on each sheet you should always place notes on the Notes-Sheet class.

After making these choices you have the option to format the notes by clicking the Format button for both Text and Worksheet. (See below)

In this window you have indent settings, line spacing and bold options. However the indenting changes if you stretch the placed notes after you have set them on the sheet. So it is best to have guide lines to work to when placing the notes. That way you can avoid stretching the text group, which is what the placed ConDoc notes are, a "group" of items in VectorWorks. To edit the placed text you would edit the group.

In the image above we have just a sampling of how the ConDoc notes would look after placing them on the sheet. Notice the bolding for divisions. If you want everything left justified you can do that as well.

The Keynotes Manager and General Notes Tools

The Keynotes Manager works exactly like the ConDoc Notes Manager. What keynoting provides you in ARCHITECT is the ability to customize your noting standard for your office and to collect key notes into a database similar to the ConDoc notes database. You can add, remove and edit individual sections and items in the Keynotes Manager as well. In the image below you can see the Section and note Item pulldown menus. The actual note text appears in the box below.

As in most VectorWorks dialog boxes and windows when you move the cursor over an item and wait a descriptive explanation appears in the Description box. Above you see "The text of the note" because the cursor was floating over the Note Text box.

Placing Keynotes works like ConDoc notes. Choose the appropriate button and click where you want the note to appear. This window then pops up allowing you to choose the keynote from the database.

Note that you have several choices for the Key Note Label. All of them place some kind of prefix in front of the the note number (which is 1 in our case). The prefix is set to 'See Note'. See note placed in the detail below. (in purple it says, See Note 1)

Even though you can place both ConDoc and Keynotes in the same drawing you would normally never do that (though you could). We did it in our detail example for this article but wouldn't do it in practice. Note that in the detail above the different colors relate to class color settings. One for Notes-Sheet and one for Notes-Model. That can be very helpful if you do use both types of classes for notes, allowing you to know visually which are related to the model and which to the sheet. Diehl Graphsoft says that those related to the model would normally apply to archived details for future jobs -- such as symbols of entire standard details for future use.

General notes in a project can be assembled with the General notes tools. From the Notes menu you would select Note Manager -- which looks just like Keynotes manager. The difference in this system is that the notes are not associated with placed callout (note) items in the drawings. Instead, this system is for general project notes.

Once your 'general notes' are assembled in the database you can place them on your drawing via the Notes menu. In the Create Note Block window you have the ability to choose which notes to include from the database (as you don't need to choose all of them) and to order them in sequence. VW ARCHITECT can number them in the order you arrange as well as provide any prefix to the numbering schema. Indentation tools provide for the customized look of your notes.

Closing Comments

VectorWorks ARCHITECT provides a huge improvement in notation tools for AEC professionals currently using MiniCAD or VectorWorks alone. The notes database managers for either ConDoc or Keynoting provide for the ability to assemble office standard-based note databases keying into your CSI specifications.

Also, with ARCHITECT you can preload ConDoc notes databases if they are assembled in tab-delimited ASCII text files. This would enable you to use a database program like FileMaker Pro to harvest data from building product catalogs and specifications and assemble an "office ConDoc database" for use in both specification writing and VectorWorks ARCHITECT notation. That way specification writers can generate the actual note for each ConDoc item and load the completed and modified database into VW ARCHITECT. In FileMaker this would entail exporting the database to a tab-delimited ASCII text file and then importing that data into ARCHITECT. You do this via the Current Note Sets command which is accessed via the VA Preferences menu under the File menu.

Aside from the speed improvements in actually choosing notes during note placement, which are mentioned on the previous page, VW ARCHITECT has a commanding grasp of the notation needs of AEC professionals. The new Notes tools, along with the new Task Manager, are the most compelling features of VectorWorks ARCHITECT. We will look forward to improvements in a system that has a great foundation.

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