Best Practices Course – Week 3 Part 2 – © copyright 2012 by Eric Bobrow

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 3 – Get More Organized

PART 2 – Optimizing Your Template

Hello this is Eric Bobrow with week number three, Get More Organized, the section on optimizing your template.  When you complete a project, it’s time to optimize your template. I think you need to look at what you did in that project that you learned from, and what you changed, and see if any part of this can be reused in the next project, or of course in your template, where it will be useful for all subsequent projects.

And the first question that we often get asked is, “Should you update your template or start over from the new PLN file?”  You see, some of our users have suggested that they are very happy with the process of starting a new project, the PLN file, from the latest project PLN.  They take that PLN file and save it as a new name, and then delete the stuff from it and then keep going.  So the advantage when you do that is that you’re able to incorporate everything that you’ve learned, so any tweaks that you’ve done are automatically included in the next file.  So obviously the idea here is that it’s getting better as you go along. as you learn more. There is a disadvantage, you do have to delete everything specific to the earlier project. Now it’s not too hard to delete the building and annotation, but there are a lot of things that may be very specific to that project the you do have to clear out as you go along, so it can take some additional time that way. And that’s depending upon where you are in your learning process. It may be a big disadvantage or not.

So this approach is best when you’re first working on a template. Because each time you work on a project, you’re learning quite a bit and you’re improving it, so you’re making lots of changes each time. And it’s perhaps easier to just carry this forward then it is to try to go back to the template file, the TPL, and improve it.  However, it’s not really ideal as a long-term strategy, because it tends to make things sort of sloppy. Just carrying things forward without thinking, I think is not the optimum way to do it.

So how do you optimize your TPL, your template file, from a PLN, the latest files you been working on?  Basically you need to systematically go through your PLN file and assess what you can reuse or improve in your TPL.  The advantage is you can incorporate selectively, so you can go through and pick up things you know are useful, ignore things that are specific to the project.  And you can optimize the TPL file as you go.  The disadvantage is that it takes some work, and some thought.  You have to think things through to do it right.  Now its best when your template is already usable and fairly stable, and you’re tweaking it, you’re making it a bit better each time.  It does encourage systematic thinking and best practices when you are able to take this on.  So I think this is something that we should all aspire too, I think it’s probably the better way to go in the long term.

Now, with that being said, if you are in the process of creating a new project file, and you prefer to you use the last project PLN as the basis, here are some tips.  Delete what you don’t need, and keep things that you might.  So, before you get started doing that, make sure you “Save As”, so save this as a new name, that way you don’t accidentally delete a bunch of stuff and hit the save button without thinking and mess up your actual project, the one that you were using as the basis for the new one.  So you’ve saved it as a new project file, put it into the correct folder where you’re going to be working on that project.

Then to clean up the plans is actually pretty simple.  You can use the marquee tool, choose the heavy option for the marquee, and just simply use the delete key on your keyboard, it will then delete everything that you see on all the stories. Of course you will want to turn on all errors an unlock them, just a general suggestion. That way you’re going to make sure that you get rid of everything as opposed to just the things that are on visible layers.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve deleted things and then gone and found things later because they were on layers that were hidden at the time.  So it is good to go to the layer dialog box, select all, show, and unlock before you do this.

Now when you hit the delete key, you’re going to be deleting everything. And if you have any source markers, and I would assume that if this project as well developed, that you do have elevation and section markers and perhaps other things like detail markers called out in the plan; you’ll get a warning from ArchiCAD saying, “If you delete those source markers, you’ll be deleting those viewpoints.” And that’s really not a good idea for starting your next project.  Ideally, you want to keep all the source markers that will be useful to you. So that often means all of the elevations, if you have four or some similar number of elevation markers; and at least some, if not all, of the section markers.

Now, if you’ve got a lot of sections in this project, and your next project is going to have fewer, you might want to delete some of those that you think you won’t need. And of course move those section markers off to the side until you actually have a building to move them into proper position for.  But to it in order to avoid deleting all of the source markers, you can use the option that comes up in the dialog box where you cancel.  So you’ll get an option saying, after you the delete key, it will say, “If you delete these markers you’re going to delete the viewpoints.” And it will give you the option to proceed, and there’s an option to proceed but keep the viewpoints, which is not really what you want.  Because you really want to keep the source markers. The viewpoints are not very useful unless they have a source.  So use the option that says cancel.  Which contrary to maybe your intuitive expectation, doesn’t cancel the whole process, it just cancels the deleting all of the source markers.  So what you’ll end up having is no building or annotiation, but just a bunch of markers left.

Now, this will take care of the plan, you might say the floor plan, but it’s actually floor plan, ceiling plan, site plan, all of those things.  But you will need to separately go through your elevations and sections and details to get rid of things that are too deep. Stuff that is left over. Because anything that was too deep will to sit there. And you can also go through your materials and composites to delete things. You can do this as you work on them. In other words, when you bring up an elevation in your new project, you can get rid of some of the stuff that was left over from the old one.  Or you may want to go through all at once basically, get this all cleaned up and ready to go.  And this is where it can seem sort of tedious, because there may be a bunch of sections and a bunch of elevations and details. And you have to go through and essentially delete a whole lot of stuff that won’t be useful in the new project.  And this is why it can often be better to have a template file that you’ve developed further and further. Because you’re basically, once you’ve got a template pretty well established, you’re going to want to add to it selectively, and you won’t have to delete a whole bunch of stuff like in the previous case.

So to optimize your TPL file from the PLN, you’ll need to systematically go through it, that most recent project or perhaps more than one project that you were working on, and assess what you can reuse or improve in your template.  So Attribute Manager will be a great tool for a number of things. For example, if you’ve developed any new materials, or fills, line types, composites, layers or actually complex profiles; any of these that you’ve created that you can transfer from the project file into the template. Basically what you’ll need to do is to have the template open, the TPL file open, and then in Attribute Manager, tell it on the right side to open the PLN file as a resource. And select some of the things that you know were added and go ahead and bring them into the file that is on the left side, which would be your TPL.  And when you do that, you have a choice to select some things on the right side. And then you will click a button that says either, “overwrite” or “append”.  Now if you use the overwrite button, that’s perfect when you’ve updated a resource. For example, you’ve made a material better.  Or a composite, you’ve tweaked it and made it work better.  So overwriting will just make a better version inside the template.  However, if this was a new resource, a new composite or complex profile, then it’s usually better to hit “append” and it will then be added to the end of the list. Rather than taking a chance of possibly when you overwrite it, you could overwrite a different material or composite or complex profile.  So, use overwrite when you’re consciously updating, and use append when you’re adding an attribute.

Now boilerplate content and reusable content. Well certainly we have things like our general notes that you may want to take and copy and paste. So this would be something that you might handle separately using the Word file that you’ve got, which will be discussed in a later section of the training. But let’s say that you have some text that you’ve placed in a text block on the sheet, or in a worksheet that you’re going to be placing as notes on a plan or on a layout. Or possibly some content that you actually placed in specific views where there’s an elevation or a section or something like that.  You can copy and paste essentially having the PLN file open in one instance of ArchiCAD and a template file in another one. And you go back and forth and you simply scan through the project file, the PLN, and then in the template file go paste it into the appropriate location. So simply going through all your different viewpoints, with an eye for what can you really use. What would be helpful to have for another project.

Now interactive legends are the tools that we recommend using for quick access to favorite settings. This visual array of components is something that you can develop yourself.  Or if you get Master Template for example, you’ll have a very extensive set of that is provided. However, over time, you may want to add more things to this. And so you would then copy individual items or groups of items from the project file into the legend file. So the legend file is not – if you use the method that we have in Master Template, it’s a separate file, this link into the template, rather than a part of the template itself.  So then you would copy and paste into the legend PLN.

Now if you have favorites that you have added to the list, then you can use the option from favorites tool to save the favorites, and this will export it in xml file. So it’s a little text file that’ll go somewhere. You can put it wherever you wish, but perhaps into your office standards folder. And then having saved it from the PLN file, you can use the load option in the favorites palette to bring it into the favorites in the template. Now when you load it, you’ll have a choice of whether you want to replace the favorites entirely with what you just are bringing in, or if you want to merge it. So the merge option is good because it will add the new items that you’ve incorporated. And I think it will overwrite ones that have the same name. But it won’t delete the ones that aren’t included. So this will typically tend to add to the favorites list with the merge option rather than replace it.  So in general that’s probably a little bit better option.

Now there are some parts of this that can get more complicated, because of the way that they work. If you have tweaked your layer combinations, so you’ve realized that a certain layer combination should have different layers turned on, or perhaps you’ve added some new layers into your file that you decide should be in the template; you will need to go through the layer combinations and update them to match whatever you have worked out in the PLN.  So you’ll have to manually revise the TPL.  The same thing with Model View Options. If there were some settings that you say, “Hey, I’d really prefer changing a certain way that something looks.”  You’ll need to manually revise it, because  the Attribute Manager, nothing actually in ArchiCAD will allow you to copy those things from one file to another. Which is unfortunate. It can be a little tedious, depending upon how many changes you’ve made.

Now in the project map, you’re creating viewpoints.  So you’re creating sections, elevations, details, etcetera. Perhaps there are some things you’ve added to the project map that might be useful in your template.  Maybe you’ve decided the you really want to have a section of the project map for a site context image, something from Google maps or things like that.  If you didn’t have a worksheet for that, maybe you’ve added that.  So you would want to create a similar viewpoint in the project map, in the template, just as an organizational tool.  In the same way with the view map, perhaps you’ve decided that you need to – you’ve added some additional views that you didn’t have before, that you feel would be useful in the next project or in many of your next projects. Then you’ll need to create those in the view map of the template. And essentially you have to recreate this in the template file.  There’s no way to copy a view from one project to another.

And the same thing with the layout book. Now with the layout book, actually you can import from one project to another using the organizer.  And when we get into the section of the course where we’re looking at the project organizer and working with the layout book, I’ll make sure to cover that. But basically, you can either create additional sheets manually in your template, if you decided that you like to have them in the template, or you can import from another project. This will then allow you to optimize your PLN file.

Now the dimensions preferences are actually something that you may want to tweak. There are some things, certainly there are various settings that you may decide that you want to revise. These are stored in the project preferences. And anything in the project preferences also you would have to manually recreate. So the general rule here is to evaluate whatever is worth keeping, and recreate it in the TPL.

And I think I’ve gone on for some length describing these things, and it can sound like a rather large burden, but I would say that once your template is reasonably well developed, these things are going to be only a few things here or there that you’ll need to add.  So this again is very effective if you’re just adding and tweaking relatively small number of things.

Now the photo rendering settings, if you’ve adjusted them, if you realize that some things are going to work better for you in terms of photo rendering, these are saved in the views.  So when you create a view, you can have views of course for drawings, like floor plans and sections, but you can also save views for 3D views of the project. Whether there in the 3D window or in the photo rendering window. And so what you can do is save the photo rendering settings in the views. So you will need to of course recreate whatever settings you’ve changed in the new project.

Now, other things that you may be optimizing as you go along, and you learn how to use ArchiCAD better, or you’ve just come up with some new ideas, you might include the palette layouts. In other words, you might decide to move palettes around and find they’re actually working a little bit better for you.  And you might add some keyboard shortcuts.  These are typically saved in your work environment. And will show up and will be there for your next project. If you say, “Create a new project”, right now, whatever your layouts are will stay unless you choose to overwrite them.  So it’ll give you the option to use your current work environment and so that will just carry across.

Now, if you do want to take this work environment to another computer, whether it’s a laptop, so you’re working on your desktop and you want to have a similar setup on the laptop, or another work station; for example, at home, or a colleague’s work station, or perhaps take it all around the office; there is an option in your work environment to save a scheme, which would record a number of preferences in the work environment, and then you can load that scheme into the other computers.  So, this is not actually part of the project or the template but people often think of it in the same vein. It’s basically a preference that is saved with your work station as opposed to the project.

Now, another thing to think about is if you’ve created some library parts in the project, are any of them really usable for other projects? Or will you want to have them around? So, if you created a new logo, or a new graphic for the North arrow, or a certain type of arch, or anything else that you think, “Well, you know, I probably will want to use this again.”  then perhaps you would want to save from the project library out a copy of that file and put it into the office library. And in the section on library management, we will be talking a lot about how you deal with the library manager, and this particular question will be addressed.  But in general, think about whether anything you’ve created for the project would really do well to be in your office library.

And one other thing that is similar to that is perhaps you’ve created a room, whether it’s a kitchen, or an office, or a lobby, or a veranda; it could be a group of elements that are something you might want to reuse.  These things can be copied from the project and put into a file, any type of file, potentially a module file would be one. We have it setup in Master Template, for example, in the interactive legends, that there is a whole group of rooms that are typical setup.  And you can then, when you want to put in a commercial restaurant that can meet the code requirements, you can literally just grab a copy of that and drop it into the project and then adapt it as needed. So would any of your room configurations in this project be reusable?  Instead of directly putting it directly into the TPL, you might want to put it into your separate file module or your interactive legends.

So general tips about this are to think about optimization as you go, and take notes on what you discover and what you revise. So you might want to have a special place either on your computer for a digital file like a Word document or something like that, or notepad text file, that you just want to periodically add to whenever you say, “Hmm. I want to remember that to update the template.”  It would be foolish that every time you have a thought to go open the template and update it.  It’s probably better to periodically update the TPL file based on those notes so you can be more efficient. That way, you can do a number of things all at once.  And whether that’s after a week, or month, or once a year, it’s really up to you, and depends upon how much you’ve learned along the way.  But a little careful effort optimizing your template will go a long way, and I think this is really fits into the general best practices approach which is to think about what you’re doing. Think in terms of systems, think in terms of long-term efficiency, and you’re going to be able to work with ArchiCAD better and better over time.  So thank you for watching, and I look forward to seeing you on the next module.