WELCOME
I’d like to welcome all ArchiCAD users to watch this week’s lessons in the Best Practices Course. This page is Part 1.
To access Part 2 or 3, sign up for a free Preview Membership on the Home page. There is no cost or obligation – you simply fill in your name and email address and will be sent a password and login instructions.
You’ll then be able to watch the rest of this week’s training materials, as well as The 7 Keys to Best Practices for ArchiCAD, a series of 3 videos that make up the first week of the course. Thanks for your interest in my ArchiCAD video training – I hope you enjoy the presentations. Please add your comments below to let me know what you find useful.
Eric Bobrow
This 15 minute segment on using Microsoft Word and PDF to create General Notes and Specifications is the first part of week #5.
ArchiCAD has the ability to format text fairly nicely, but it lacks a number of key features that are particularly important in lengthy documents such as general notes. It has rudimentary tab settings without hierarchy or automatic numbering, cannot add graphic enhancements such as boxes around paragraphs that are tied to specific text within a larger block, and does not have multi-column capabilities so each block must be edited and reflowed manually.
This lesson shows how to use Word to create the general notes for a project and save them as a PDF to be placed into ArchiCAD. Because Word limits the maximum size of a page to 22″ square, a custom page is created that is the size of one of the columns on the layout. The PDF pages are placed as Drawings onto the sheet, with one PDF page in each column. When the Word document is revised, after overwriting the PDF file, the ArchiCAD layout is easily updated.
NOTE: This video is recorded at 1420 x 800 pixels, and displayed in the course website page at 50%. I suggest that you move your mouse over the video while it’s playing to reveal the controls, then click the “full screen” button in the bottom right to be able to see all the detail. You can hit “ESC” on your keyboard to leave full-screen mode at any time.