Week #5

Week #5 – General Notes & Specifications

5-3. General Notes and Your Template

ArchiCAD Training (Best Practices Lesson 5-3)

This 25 minute segment is the final part of week #5. In this section I show how to maintain a set of boilerplate general notes in your template, and create independent editable copies for every new project.

I also include some general tips about using the Drawing Manager to update and maintain links to drawings from external files and folders.

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Best Practices Course – Week 5 Part 3 – © copyright 2012 by Eric Bobrow BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 5 – General Notes and Specifications PART 3 – General Notes and Your Template Hello, this is Eric Bobrow, with the third and final section of week number five, where we’ve been looking at creating general notes and specifications in a word processor like Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages, creating a PDF, and placing that PDF to create the general notes pages in your Layout Book. [0:21] Now, I’m going to go and set up in my template the set of boilerplate notes that we’ll be using as we start a new project, and then updating as we work on the project. So let’s take a look at that process. I’m going to go ahead and open the template, because I’d like to update it. If you say “Open”, and you go find a TPL file like this one here, you’re going to be able to edit it as opposed to when you say “New File” and then you either browse for or select from a list of templates. [1:00] Because when you create a new file based on a template, it will open the template, but then create an untitled new copy of it, whereas when I am doing this now, I am telling it to open that TPL file, and then at the point that it finishes reading it, it will still say the name of the template at the top. So it won’t say, “Untitled”, it will have the name. So right now, you can see it says “BCG MasterTemplate 14” at the top, and even after I finish opening it, it will still say that. [1:32] So now I’ve got that file open, I’m going to skip the message about updating drawings, because that’s something that you’ll get every time you open a file. You can always say “Skip All” unless you’re about to print a drawing set, because you can always update as you need to along the way. Now, I’m going to get rid of some things from my explanatory notes from MasterTemplate that I don’t need. So I’ll just get rid of this welcome message and all of the other things that are grouped with it. [2:07] And so now this is a simpler environment to get started with. I’m going to go to the layout book, and go to the general notes here, and we’ll see that the general notes right now in MasterTemplate, we provide a structure for this. But the actual notes that are on the page are just a guide for how you work with it. So this is page one, this is page two. You can see it says “Page Placeholder”. So basically, we provide a blank Word file, but it’s set up with multiple columns to be a framework for doing it. [2:50] Now, I’ve created, in Word, a set of boilerplate notes, and these are set up in the approach where each page is a column. So this right now I highlighted some things in the first column and you’ll see down below it says “Pages 1 of 15”. If I highlight some things in the second column, it will say “Pages 2 of 15”, and this is page three, etc. So each column is a page in this particular approach. [3:23] And I’ve created a PDF file, which if I bring it up, you can see this is one page in the PDF; it’s one column. So that file is located here in the finder, and I just did that this evening. And I’m going to go ahead and overwrite where I’ve got that stored currently in the template. I have the earlier version that I’d done a few months back, when we created the ArchiCAD 14 version of the template. I’ve got that here, and I’m going to overwrite this. So I’m going to drive this in on top of it, and I’ll use the Option key to make a copy, because I’m going to leave a copy behind where my source was. [4:07] But I’m now going to take that copy and overwrite, or replace, the PDF here. Now, having done that, if I go back to ArchiCAD, we don’t see a change immediately, but if I go ahead and click on this column, which is a drawing, and tell it to update, then it’s going to have an updated version. You can see how this now has the first page of the boilerplate notes rather than the original place holder. [4:38] Now, if I click on the green button here, it will update all of the drawings on this page. And you can see that they have all now been filled in. And I could go, if I go to the next sheet, I could go and click the green button again, so that all of these place holders would be updated. But instead, just for demonstration, I’m going to open up the Drawing Manager here, from the project chooser, and in the Drawing Manager, I’ll go and find where these PDFs are. [5:06] And you can see there are a number of PDF files. This particular one is one of the ones that are on this page. I’ll just go and highlight all of them. I’ll scroll down and highlight all of these PDFs here, and I’ll just say, “Update”. So now I’m using the green button in the Drawing Manager, and it’s going to go, and within a few seconds, it will update the specifications on all of the sheets. So, I could leave this Drawing Manager open, but as soon as it finishes, I’ll close it, and you’ll see that the layout has updated, and when I go to the next page of course, it’s also got the new notes. [5:45] Now, before I actually go ahead and save this as my active template, I want to update the Title Block. So, I’m going to go down to the Masters, which is where we have all of the repeating content. This particular Master here, you can see it says, “MT Notes 5 Column”. So I’ll go up to the “MT Notes 5 Column” here and here is the actual Layout Master. And I’ll select this ArchiCAD MasterTemplate Logo, and replace it. [6:20] I’ll say “Link This Drawing To”. So we can do this at any time. I can take any type of drawing and say, I’d like to relink it to something else. In this case an external source file. I’ll browse and go find my new company logo. And you can see within a couple of seconds, I now have a new logo there. [6:41] Now, there is another page, the “MT Standard”. So this is one without the multiple columns for the notes, and I can go ahead and update that individually. Again, just say right click on this, and say, “Link Drawing To”, and find that file and tell it to link. However, I do have a whole lot of layout sheets, so how would I do this all at once? Well, I can go again to the Drawing Manager. [7:14] And we’ll see that the current logo is this one. You can see it’s a little bit bold; it’s on the current sheet. But the earlier logos were called “AMT Layout Master Company Logo”, and those ones there are linked to an older file. And what I’d like to do is link all of these. So I’ll just say, click on the link icon, they all were linked to the same files, so I’ll just say link them to a different file. And do this here, and all of them now will, within a few seconds, be updated. [7:48] So here I want to make them all the same file, and if I go to any of the other sheets, perhaps a different size sheet, we’ll see that it’s now got the new logo. So I’ll just close up the Masters, and you can see that now the general notes is on a sheet that has the new logo. So I’ll close up the Layout sheet, and I’ll be back at the front page here, and I’ll just update my template. [8:20] So now I’m going to create a new file based on this template. So, instead of using standard ArchiCAD 14 one, I’ll use this “BCG MasterTemplate” here as the beginning, and say “New”, and this will close the file I’m working on, and create a new file based on, in this case, the same template file. So again, I get the “Update Drawings?” warning, which I can skip, and I’m now in and untitled copy of the template, ready to work on a real project. So, how would we start the real project? I’m going to go now to the File menu and say “Save As”, and make sure that it’s saving as an ArchiCAD solo project. [9:12] Be careful here, if you do “Save As”, it will bring it up the last thing you were doing. So if you were saving DWG files or JPEGs or something like that, that will be the format that it’s going to think that you want when you do a “Save As”. So you need to make sure that you’re saving a solo project. [9:29] So, let me go and create this. Let’s call this the “Reynolds’ Residence”, and we’ll go to My Documents folder, My Projects, and we’ll create a folder here. Here’s the “Reynolds Residence” folder, and I’ll go head and save that. Okay, so we’ve now saved that. We’re going to of course, in the course of doing the project, at some point be ready to work on the notes. So in other words, these general notes here that were boilerplate, we’re going to need to make revisions, and we’re going to start referring to the project. [10:12] So how would we actually do that? I’m going to go back to Word here, and here I’ve got the notes that were being worked on, and let me just make something as a quick change here. I’ll just zoom in a little bit. And let’s say I’m going to add some spaces here in and I’ll just put in – So I’ve just put in some new notes that would refer to the particular project. [10:55] Of course this would go through all of the pages, everything that you need to do, but how would this work in terms of the workflow? Well, the “Master Specifications” document that I’ve got, what is ideal is we’re going to do a “Save As”, and save it into the “Reynolds’ Residence” folder. So when you go to the Documents folder here, to Projects, and “Reynolds Residence”, and I’ll go ahead and save it as a Word file, so it now has the same name, “Master_Specifications.docx”, in this case. [11:32] And let’s just assume that I’ve done enough that I would like to get this updated in the project. I’ll go and print it to PDF. This, on the Mac, is how you do it. You go to Print and then save as PDF, but on Windows, you might do different process. So here I am creating the PDF in the “Reynolds Residence” folder. And now let me go back to the project and of course, this area right here is where I’m going to see the change, the new text, and how things slide around, because I’ve inserted some text. [12:22] Now, how would I update it? Well I could go to this one drawing here, and say that I’d like to link this one drawing to an external source. Go browse for the “Reynolds Residence” project here, and say I’d like to get the “Master Specifications” file, and in this case it’s a page 1, and say “Place It”, and you can see now that it’s updated. But then I would have to do it for all of the columns that are separate pages. So let me propose a quicker, simpler way, which is to go into the Drawing Manager. And let’s go find all of these specifications. [13:13] So I’ll highlight all of them. Now, if I highlight all of them that are from the same source, and I use the “Link Drawing To”, they will all come to the new file that I’m pointing at, but they’ll all be the same page. That’s really not the ideal thing, because obviously each one of these is a separate column or page. Now, in this case because one of them is coming from a different source, it has changed the icon from the “Link To”, which is what it looks like here, you can see it says “Link Drawing To”, and as soon as I have a drawing that comes from a different source, it changes to “Read From”. [14:02] Now, if I hadn’t already done the one change where it was picking up the master specifications PDF from the new location, then this would all still say “Link To”. But I can force it by simply including that one additional item, in this case an internal drawing, and then it will say “Read From”. This will always make it say “Read From”. So you’ll want to pick all of the PDFs, plus one more, and then it will say “Read From”. Click on that, and then you tell it what folder. [14:36] Now I’m already in the “Reynolds Residence” folder, so that actually won’t work. What I need to do is highlight the “Reynolds Residence” folder and click the button that says “Choose”. And what that will do is it will actually look in there, and you see one of them is already okay, because I had just updated it. The other ones it says are modified here, and I can go ahead and say “Update these”. And so it is actually just going ahead and updating all of these. [15:03] And you’ll notice that the page numbers here, 2,3,4,5, etcetera, these all remained independent. So now, if I go back to the sheet and close up the Drawing Manager, we’ll see of course that the sheet is updated. And these have all slid around a little bit, because I added those extra lines of text. [15:32] So the basic idea here is when you start a new project, you can leave the general notes linked to the original template notes. But then at some point you’re going to want to use the Drawing Manager and point them to a new set of notes that are specific to that project. And the easiest way to do that is to simply open the boilerplate notes in Word, or Apple’s Pages, and start updating it, start putting in things that are specific to that project, and create a copy of the document in the – let’s go to the Documents, Projects, and here’s the “Reynolds Residence”. [16:15] So I’ve created a copy of the specifications there, and then created a PDF file from that, and inside the PLN, I’ve used the Drawing Manager to link all of these to the PDF. I’d like to point out one thing that is a subtle feature in the Drawing Manager, that Graphisoft improved over the years. I’m not sure at what point this came in, but I think it’s been around for quite a number of versions, yet a lot of people don’t know about it. And that is what’s called a Relative Path. [16:53] So you’ll see here the company logo has all of these slashes here, and then it records where that path is. Now, the slashes indicate that this is a relative path. It’s probably a little bit clearer to understand when I go to the PDF for the specifications, and you’ll see it says “/Master_Specification.pdf”. So what does that mean? It’s that it’s looking for this and it’s linked to the file called “Master Specifications”. It’s in the same folder, that’s what this forward slash refers to. It means the same folder there. [17:33] So if we were to create a new file, so let’s just go and close this up for now, and go back to the floor plan, and let me just create a new file. So I’ve just created a new file called “Bobrow Residence”, and that is located in the same general area. In this case, it’s in my projects folder, and of course it’s in a separate folder here. You can see where that’s located. [18:11] Now, in the ArchiCAD project, if I go to the Drawing Manager, and we look for those notes, it’s saying that the specifications are coming from and the slashes indicate that it’s going up out of the Bobrow folder, and then over to the “Reynolds Residence” folder, and finding the specifications within that. So it actually recorded the path to the specifications as saying, “Go up and then over, and then you’ll find this file”. [18:52] Now, let me contrast that with another way that we could create a new file. Instead of doing a “Save As”, and then having to update the PDF, here’s what you can do. So here I’m looking in the Finder, in my Operating System, and I have the “Reynolds Residence” PLN and the “Reynolds Residence” folder of course, and what I’ll do is I’ll actually duplicate this folder. [19:18] So I’m going to duplicate it, and you can see now it says, “Reynolds Residence (copy)”. Let me just call this something else, like “Boehmer Residence” in honor of my colleague, Scott Boehmer. And you can see here, is the “Boehmer Residence” folder, and of course I’d want to rename the Residence here. So now in the file that we’re opening in this manner, we’re going to see something a little different in the Drawing Manager. We scroll down to the specifications, and you’ll notice that is says the specifications are okay, and they still say “/Master_Specifications.pdf”. [20:07] And what that means it is it’s actually going to be looking for the specifications in this folder, rather than in the previous folder. So if I go ahead in Word, and let me just update this for the “Boehmer Residence”, let me go ahead and save this in the “Boehmer Residence” folder, replacing that. And create a PDF. And I go back to ArchiCAD, and we go back to the general notes, and I just say “Update”. You see now it says “Boehmer Residence”. [21:07] So just to make it really clear what I did that was different, and why this is a good trick to know about; if I go back into my Operating System, the Finder, I took a project folder and duplicated it to create the new project. And by doing that, the PLN file kept the link that was local. Meaning that the earlier residence project went looking for the PDF file within the same folder. And by duplicating this, then the new residents file, the new PLN, is looking for the PDF in the same folder. It’s going to be linked there. [21:56] So while I wouldn’t necessarily be picking one project and duplicating it, because I think that that’s probably less effective than using a template, what I would suggest is that as I went into one of the earlier lessons, is that you have a typical project folder that you duplicate. And when you duplicate that typical project folder, you’re going to have a copy of your template within it that is already a PLN file. So imagine that this was actually a project folder, and that that project folder just had the name here. [22:48] So now, when I duplicate the project folder, and in the new folder I change the project name to the appropriate client, and change the folder name to the appropriate client, then I end up with something like what we just created here for the Boehmer Residence, where we’ve got a new project ready to go, but it’s already linked to the specifications in here. And I have a copy of the boilerplate specifications ready to be updated. So I can basically open this up in Word, or in Apple Pages, make changes, update the PDF, and then the PLN file will actually update automatically because it will be linked locally. [23:39] So just to see whether a link is relative or not, if we go back to the Drawing Manager, what you’ll see, if I highlight any one of these here, and I go to the Settings, you’ll see that the link here is on a relative path. And so that means that it’s recording its location relative to the project, as opposed to something that might be an absolute path. If I were to change this, perhaps, to the absolute path, you’ll see that it records this longer path. See you can actually switch it on the fly in later versions of ArchiCAD to say, “You want to record the source file based on the absolute path or the relative path?” [24:32] And having it in a relative path will mean that if you do duplicate the folder, it will keep that link. This is also good when you want to take a file from one computer to another, perhaps a desktop to a laptop, or work to home, is that you take the entire project folder along with you, and it’s ideal to have your Drawing Manager, the links, in most cases set to be relative. So that’s going to be another very useful tip is to understand the difference between relative and absolute. [25:06] Addressing for the Drawing Manager, for anything that’s coming from outside the project as opposed to internal views, which are like schedules and sections and elevations, but from anything outside the project, to have it as a relative path will simplify duplicating project folders or taking an active project folder off to another computer to work on. So this concludes our section of the third week, our final section of the third week on general notes and specifications with a lot of tips and tricks about the Drawing Manager and updating for when you’re creating new projects. Thanks for watching.

Click here to see the transcript of this ArchiCAD training lesson...

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 5 – General Notes and Specifications

PART 3 – General Notes and Your Template

Hello, this is Eric Bobrow, with the third and final section of week number five, where we’ve been looking at creating general notes and specifications in a word processor like Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages, creating a PDF, and placing that PDF to create the general notes pages in your Layout Book. [0:21]

Now, I’m going to go and set up in my template the set of boilerplate notes that we’ll be using as we start a new project, and then updating as we work on the project. So let’s take a look at that process. I’m going to go ahead and open the template, because I’d like to update it. If you say “Open”, and you go find a TPL file like this one here, you’re going to be able to edit it as opposed to when you say “New File” and then you either browse for or select from a list of templates. [1:00]

Because when you create a new file based on a template, it will open the template, but then create an untitled new copy of it, whereas when I am doing this now, I am telling it to open that TPL file, and then at the point that it finishes reading it, it will still say the name of the template at the top. So it won’t say, “Untitled”, it will have the name. So right now, you can see it says “BCG MasterTemplate 14” at the top, and even after I finish opening it, it will still say that. [1:32]

So now I’ve got that file open, I’m going to skip the message about updating drawings, because that’s something that you’ll get every time you open a file. You can always say “Skip All” unless you’re about to print a drawing set, because you can always update as you need to along the way. Now, I’m going to get rid of some things from my explanatory notes from MasterTemplate that I don’t need. So I’ll just get rid of this welcome message and all of the other things that are grouped with it. [2:07]

And so now this is a simpler environment to get started with. I’m going to go to the layout book, and go to the general notes here, and we’ll see that the general notes right now in MasterTemplate, we provide a structure for this. But the actual notes that are on the page are just a guide for how you work with it. So this is page one, this is page two. You can see it says “Page Placeholder”. So basically, we provide a blank Word file, but it’s set up with multiple columns to be a framework for doing it. [2:50]

Now, I’ve created, in Word, a set of boilerplate notes, and these are set up in the approach where each page is a column. So this right now I highlighted some things in the first column and you’ll see down below it says “Pages 1 of 15”. If I highlight some things in the second column, it will say “Pages 2 of 15”, and this is page three, etc. So each column is a page in this particular approach. [3:23]

And I’ve created a PDF file, which if I bring it up, you can see this is one page in the PDF; it’s one column. So that file is located here in the finder, and I just did that this evening. And I’m going to go ahead and overwrite where I’ve got that stored currently in the template. I have the earlier version that I’d done a few months back, when we created the ArchiCAD 14 version of the template. I’ve got that here, and I’m going to overwrite this. So I’m going to drive this in on top of it, and I’ll use the Option key to make a copy, because I’m going to leave a copy behind where my source was. [4:07]

But I’m now going to take that copy and overwrite, or replace, the PDF here. Now, having done that, if I go back to ArchiCAD, we don’t see a change immediately, but if I go ahead and click on this column, which is a drawing, and tell it to update, then it’s going to have an updated version. You can see how this now has the first page of the boilerplate notes rather than the original place holder. [4:38]

Now, if I click on the green button here, it will update all of the drawings on this page. And you can see that they have all now been filled in. And I could go, if I go to the next sheet, I could go and click the green button again, so that all of these place holders would be updated. But instead, just for demonstration, I’m going to open up the Drawing Manager here, from the project chooser, and in the Drawing Manager, I’ll go and find where these PDFs are. [5:06]

And you can see there are a number of PDF files. This particular one is one of the ones that are on this page. I’ll just go and highlight all of them. I’ll scroll down and highlight all of these PDFs here, and I’ll just say, “Update”. So now I’m using the green button in the Drawing Manager, and it’s going to go, and within a few seconds, it will update the specifications on all of the sheets. So, I could leave this Drawing Manager open, but as soon as it finishes, I’ll close it, and you’ll see that the layout has updated, and when I go to the next page of course, it’s also got the new notes. [5:45]

Now, before I actually go ahead and save this as my active template, I want to update the Title Block. So, I’m going to go down to the Masters, which is where we have all of the repeating content. This particular Master here, you can see it says, “MT Notes 5 Column”. So I’ll go up to the “MT Notes 5 Column” here and here is the actual Layout Master. And I’ll select this ArchiCAD MasterTemplate Logo, and replace it. [6:20]

I’ll say “Link This Drawing To”. So we can do this at any time. I can take any type of drawing and say, I’d like to relink it to something else. In this case an external source file. I’ll browse and go find my new company logo. And you can see within a couple of seconds, I now have a new logo there. [6:41]

Now, there is another page, the “MT Standard”. So this is one without the multiple columns for the notes, and I can go ahead and update that individually. Again, just say right click on this, and say, “Link Drawing To”, and find that file and tell it to link. However, I do have a whole lot of layout sheets, so how would I do this all at once? Well, I can go again to the Drawing Manager. [7:14]

And we’ll see that the current logo is this one. You can see it’s a little bit bold; it’s on the current sheet. But the earlier logos were called “AMT Layout Master Company Logo”, and those ones there are linked to an older file. And what I’d like to do is link all of these. So I’ll just say, click on the link icon, they all were linked to the same files, so I’ll just say link them to a different file. And do this here, and all of them now will, within a few seconds, be updated. [7:48]

So here I want to make them all the same file, and if I go to any of the other sheets, perhaps a different size sheet, we’ll see that it’s now got the new logo. So I’ll just close up the Masters, and you can see that now the general notes is on a sheet that has the new logo. So I’ll close up the Layout sheet, and I’ll be back at the front page here, and I’ll just update my template. [8:20]

So now I’m going to create a new file based on this template. So, instead of using standard ArchiCAD 14 one, I’ll use this “BCG MasterTemplate” here as the beginning, and say “New”, and this will close the file I’m working on, and create a new file based on, in this case, the same template file. So again, I get the “Update Drawings?” warning, which I can skip, and I’m now in and untitled copy of the template, ready to work on a real project. So, how would we start the real project? I’m going to go now to the File menu and say “Save As”, and make sure that it’s saving as an ArchiCAD solo project. [9:12]

Be careful here, if you do “Save As”, it will bring it up the last thing you were doing. So if you were saving DWG files or JPEGs or something like that, that will be the format that it’s going to think that you want when you do a “Save As”. So you need to make sure that you’re saving a solo project. [9:29]

So, let me go and create this. Let’s call this the “Reynolds’ Residence”, and we’ll go to My Documents folder, My Projects, and we’ll create a folder here. Here’s the “Reynolds Residence” folder, and I’ll go head and save that. Okay, so we’ve now saved that. We’re going to of course, in the course of doing the project, at some point be ready to work on the notes. So in other words, these general notes here that were boilerplate, we’re going to need to make revisions, and we’re going to start referring to the project. [10:12]

So how would we actually do that? I’m going to go back to Word here, and here I’ve got the notes that were being worked on, and let me just make something as a quick change here. I’ll just zoom in a little bit. And let’s say I’m going to add some spaces here in and I’ll just put in – So I’ve just put in some new notes that would refer to the particular project. [10:55]

Of course this would go through all of the pages, everything that you need to do, but how would this work in terms of the workflow? Well, the “Master Specifications” document that I’ve got, what is ideal is we’re going to do a “Save As”, and save it into the “Reynolds’ Residence” folder. So when you go to the Documents folder here, to Projects, and “Reynolds Residence”, and I’ll go ahead and save it as a Word file, so it now has the same name, “Master_Specifications.docx”, in this case. [11:32]

And let’s just assume that I’ve done enough that I would like to get this updated in the project. I’ll go and print it to PDF. This, on the Mac, is how you do it. You go to Print and then save as PDF, but on Windows, you might do different process. So here I am creating the PDF in the “Reynolds Residence” folder. And now let me go back to the project and of course, this area right here is where I’m going to see the change, the new text, and how things slide around, because I’ve inserted some text. [12:22]

Now, how would I update it? Well I could go to this one drawing here, and say that I’d like to link this one drawing to an external source. Go browse for the “Reynolds Residence” project here, and say I’d like to get the “Master Specifications” file, and in this case it’s a page 1, and say “Place It”, and you can see now that it’s updated. But then I would have to do it for all of the columns that are separate pages. So let me propose a quicker, simpler way, which is to go into the Drawing Manager. And let’s go find all of these specifications. [13:13]

So I’ll highlight all of them. Now, if I highlight all of them that are from the same source, and I use the “Link Drawing To”, they will all come to the new file that I’m pointing at, but they’ll all be the same page. That’s really not the ideal thing, because obviously each one of these is a separate column or page. Now, in this case because one of them is coming from a different source, it has changed the icon from the “Link To”, which is what it looks like here, you can see it says “Link Drawing To”, and as soon as I have a drawing that comes from a different source, it changes to “Read From”. [14:02]

Now, if I hadn’t already done the one change where it was picking up the master specifications PDF from the new location, then this would all still say “Link To”. But I can force it by simply including that one additional item, in this case an internal drawing, and then it will say “Read From”. This will always make it say “Read From”. So you’ll want to pick all of the PDFs, plus one more, and then it will say “Read From”. Click on that, and then you tell it what folder. [14:36]

Now I’m already in the “Reynolds Residence” folder, so that actually won’t work. What I need to do is highlight the “Reynolds Residence” folder and click the button that says “Choose”. And what that will do is it will actually look in there, and you see one of them is already okay, because I had just updated it. The other ones it says are modified here, and I can go ahead and say “Update these”. And so it is actually just going ahead and updating all of these. [15:03]

And you’ll notice that the page numbers here, 2,3,4,5, etcetera, these all remained independent. So now, if I go back to the sheet and close up the Drawing Manager, we’ll see of course that the sheet is updated. And these have all slid around a little bit, because I added those extra lines of text. [15:32]

So the basic idea here is when you start a new project, you can leave the general notes linked to the original template notes. But then at some point you’re going to want to use the Drawing Manager and point them to a new set of notes that are specific to that project. And the easiest way to do that is to simply open the boilerplate notes in Word, or Apple’s Pages, and start updating it, start putting in things that are specific to that project, and create a copy of the document in the – let’s go to the Documents, Projects, and here’s the “Reynolds Residence”. [16:15]

So I’ve created a copy of the specifications there, and then created a PDF file from that, and inside the PLN, I’ve used the Drawing Manager to link all of these to the PDF. I’d like to point out one thing that is a subtle feature in the Drawing Manager, that Graphisoft improved over the years. I’m not sure at what point this came in, but I think it’s been around for quite a number of versions, yet a lot of people don’t know about it. And that is what’s called a Relative Path. [16:53]

So you’ll see here the company logo has all of these slashes here, and then it records where that path is. Now, the slashes indicate that this is a relative path. It’s probably a little bit clearer to understand when I go to the PDF for the specifications, and you’ll see it says “/Master_Specification.pdf”. So what does that mean? It’s that it’s looking for this and it’s linked to the file called “Master Specifications”. It’s in the same folder, that’s what this forward slash refers to. It means the same folder there. [17:33]

So if we were to create a new file, so let’s just go and close this up for now, and go back to the floor plan, and let me just create a new file. So I’ve just created a new file called “Bobrow Residence”, and that is located in the same general area. In this case, it’s in my projects folder, and of course it’s in a separate folder here. You can see where that’s located. [18:11]

Now, in the ArchiCAD project, if I go to the Drawing Manager, and we look for those notes, it’s saying that the specifications are coming from and the slashes indicate that it’s going up out of the Bobrow folder, and then over to the “Reynolds Residence” folder, and finding the specifications within that. So it actually recorded the path to the specifications as saying, “Go up and then over, and then you’ll find this file”. [18:52]

Now, let me contrast that with another way that we could create a new file. Instead of doing a “Save As”, and then having to update the PDF, here’s what you can do. So here I’m looking in the Finder, in my Operating System, and I have the “Reynolds Residence” PLN and the “Reynolds Residence” folder of course, and what I’ll do is I’ll actually duplicate this folder. [19:18]

So I’m going to duplicate it, and you can see now it says, “Reynolds Residence (copy)”. Let me just call this something else, like “Boehmer Residence” in honor of my colleague, Scott Boehmer. And you can see here, is the “Boehmer Residence” folder, and of course I’d want to rename the Residence here. So now in the file that we’re opening in this manner, we’re going to see something a little different in the Drawing Manager. We scroll down to the specifications, and you’ll notice that is says the specifications are okay, and they still say “/Master_Specifications.pdf”. [20:07]

And what that means it is it’s actually going to be looking for the specifications in this folder, rather than in the previous folder. So if I go ahead in Word, and let me just update this for the “Boehmer Residence”, let me go ahead and save this in the “Boehmer Residence” folder, replacing that. And create a PDF. And I go back to ArchiCAD, and we go back to the general notes, and I just say “Update”. You see now it says “Boehmer Residence”. [21:07]

So just to make it really clear what I did that was different, and why this is a good trick to know about; if I go back into my Operating System, the Finder, I took a project folder and duplicated it to create the new project. And by doing that, the PLN file kept the link that was local. Meaning that the earlier residence project went looking for the PDF file within the same folder. And by duplicating this, then the new residents file, the new PLN, is looking for the PDF in the same folder. It’s going to be linked there. [21:56]

So while I wouldn’t necessarily be picking one project and duplicating it, because I think that that’s probably less effective than using a template, what I would suggest is that as I went into one of the earlier lessons, is that you have a typical project folder that you duplicate. And when you duplicate that typical project folder, you’re going to have a copy of your template within it that is already a PLN file. So imagine that this was actually a project folder, and that that project folder just had the name here. [22:48]

So now, when I duplicate the project folder, and in the new folder I change the project name to the appropriate client, and change the folder name to the appropriate client, then I end up with something like what we just created here for the Boehmer Residence, where we’ve got a new project ready to go, but it’s already linked to the specifications in here. And I have a copy of the boilerplate specifications ready to be updated. So I can basically open this up in Word, or in Apple Pages, make changes, update the PDF, and then the PLN file will actually update automatically because it will be linked locally. [23:39]

So just to see whether a link is relative or not, if we go back to the Drawing Manager, what you’ll see, if I highlight any one of these here, and I go to the Settings, you’ll see that the link here is on a relative path. And so that means that it’s recording its location relative to the project, as opposed to something that might be an absolute path. If I were to change this, perhaps, to the absolute path, you’ll see that it records this longer path. See you can actually switch it on the fly in later versions of ArchiCAD to say, “You want to record the source file based on the absolute path or the relative path?” [24:32]

And having it in a relative path will mean that if you do duplicate the folder, it will keep that link. This is also good when you want to take a file from one computer to another, perhaps a desktop to a laptop, or work to home, is that you take the entire project folder along with you, and it’s ideal to have your Drawing Manager, the links, in most cases set to be relative. So that’s going to be another very useful tip is to understand the difference between relative and absolute. [25:06]

Addressing for the Drawing Manager, for anything that’s coming from outside the project as opposed to internal views, which are like schedules and sections and elevations, but from anything outside the project, to have it as a relative path will simplify duplicating project folders or taking an active project folder off to another computer to work on. So this concludes our section of the third week, our final section of the third week on general notes and specifications with a lot of tips and tricks about the Drawing Manager and updating for when you’re creating new projects. Thanks for watching.

ArchiCAD Training: General Notes and Your Template

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AmyDowty
13 years ago

Good work! I have one suggestion to make regarding the naming of the specifications files, which goes beyond inserting some project-identifying text at the beginning of the document.

Sometimes when you are editing specifications, you want to copy and paste specific passages from another project’s specifications – something that you don’t necessarily want to keep in your master specifications document. If every project’s specifications are called Master Specifications.doc, that can lead to trouble. When you open the two Word files at once to facilitate the copy-paste process, you will have two files open on your screen that are both called Master Specifications.doc. It is easy to get confused about which file is which, and edit something you shouldn’t. If the files have different names, you can tell at a glance, even if you are working on page 10, which document you are in.

When you are duplicating the generic Project folder to create the Bulmer Residence folder, rename the Master Specifications.doc file, just as you did the Project Name.pln file. Then using the Drawing Manager in ArchiCAD, you could change the path for the Master Specifications.doc file to point to the newly named Bulmer Specifications.doc file.

What do you think?
- Eric Bobrow
  13 years ago
  
  Amy –
  Yes, this makes a lot of sense to me. Good point!
  Eric
JohnDunham
13 years ago

Thanks for this! The insights into the basics of using the Drawing Manager and a practical demonstration of ‘relative’ vs ‘absolute’ file paths has been very useful. This type of info is difficult to come across without lots of experience – and luck!
- Eric Bobrow
  13 years ago
  
  John –
  Glad you liked the lesson!
  Thanks for posting – I appreciate it.
  Eric
Timothy Ball
14 years ago

Hi Eric. Are you going to cover the automated text facility in the Info list?

I use this for standardised text notes, but editing them is time consuming. I have not been able to find a suitable XML editor to allow easier editing outside AC. Ideally I would kike to export from an xls file, but that doesn’t create an xml file that AC can read. Any ideas?

Instead of creating drawing based notes as you have shown, we use a short specification note with an alpahnumeric code to cross refer to a seprate specification document.

I did try the CADImage software a couple of years ago but it was written too specifically for NZ.

NBS do a full system here in the UK but it is very prescriptive and creates very large diocuments sets that don’t work with non standard projects.
- Eric
  14 years ago
  
  Timothy –
  
  I will cover Autotext and the Project Info fields in one of the course modules in the second half – when I focus on documentation.
  
  I have played around with XML editors but not reached a point that I can recommend one – they all seemed a bit awkward to work with – however it’s been quite a while since I looked.
  
  The easiest way I’ve seen to manage the Project Info mini-database seems to be developing and filling in fields directly within an ArchiCAD project, then exporting the data to an XML file, then importing it into another project file and reworking as appropriate for the new context.
  
  If you’re using alphanumeric codes to create short specification notes, I suggest you reconsider the Cadimage Key Note add-on. It actually is totally customizable, so you can bring in your own information – there’s nothing about it that restricts it to use with NZ materials. We do sell Cadimage add-ons, so if you’d like to get a license or an upgrade, you may contact me if you wish. I can also help you set up the Key Note system on a consulting basis.
  
  Eric
R.Bruce Germond
14 years ago

Well Eric, what appeared, from the titles, to be a deadly dry subject has turned out to be the best group of tips yet. This would never be gleanable from ArchiCad’s manuals. Going through the drawing manager with your guidance and asides makes for another forehead slapper. You may have to generate a logo cap to cover the red spots…
Earl Applegate
14 years ago

Eric,
Do you have any experience with Cigraph products?
Would you recommend Archifacade, or any other of
their products?

Thanks,

Earl
- Eric
  14 years ago
  
  Over the years, I have tried various Cigraph products and found them pretty useful. They are based in Italy and sometimes it is hard to get tech support. They offer a lot of variety, so it’s really up to you if a particular tool seems like it would help you a great deal. I like ArchiTerra since it makes certain types of terrain modeling much easier. I wish I could be more helpful or more definitive, but my experience with their products is somewhat limited.
  - Earl Applegate
    14 years ago
    
    Thanks,
    Earl
Earl Applegate
14 years ago

Eric,
More a question than a comment. Setting up a new project; involves construction of1 New Building,
renovation of 6 buildings, and demolition of 3 buildings. All are on the same campus. I think that it will be best to set up a separate ArchiCad file for each building. Do you have any suggestions regarding file organization, numbering, etc. The buildings will be organized into 1 Construction Document Set, and will share a number of common details, schedule items, etc.

Thanks,

Earl
- Eric
  14 years ago
  
  Hi Earl –
  
  Thanks for your question – and for uploading your photo so we can see your face!
  
  One week of the Best Practices Course will be a module on managing large projects, including a section on multiple buildings. So I’ll be answering your questions in depth, but it won’t be till later in the course.
  
  So a short answer must suffice here:
  A multi-building project can be handled nicely by breaking up each building or cluster into separate PLNs. You can then place Views from each PLN into a single PLN that compiles the Layout Book for the entire project. You can also place Hotlinked Modules (HLMs) for each PLN into the project PLN to be able to create renderings and overall elevations.
  
  Some things to consider: if two or more buildings have very closely integrated structure and/or mechanical services, you may want to keep them in a single PLN. This is especially true if these buildings will be shown together in a single drawing; another reason to keep them together is if it will be much easier to model them at the same time because of their close relationship.
  
  When PLN files are separated in this type of project, only some links will be “live”. The Drawings on the Layout Sheets can be updated automatically when the sheet is viewed, but are often best set to update manually so you have control over the process. The main “broken” link category has to do with marker numbering – your section and detail markers will not be able to pull the current drawing number and sheet number from the remote PLN file where these drawings are placed. You will have to set these numbers and references in the markers manually, which is unfortunate, but will work OK if you are careful.
  
  Schedules can be a challenge. You can create a schedule (of any type) for each building, and view them in the overall project set on the same sheet, but it can be more difficult to compile one overall schedule that includes all doors (for example). If you bring in the PLNs to the overall project file as Hotlinked Modules, then you can compile an overall schedule, but will not be able to edit the fields for each door or other item in that file – you’ll have to go back to the source PLN to make the edits.
  
  I hope this is helpful as you start into this project. I’ll be happy to do a consulting session with you if you’d like me to help you or to review what you’ve done to date.
  
  Eric
  - Earl Applegate
    14 years ago
    
    Eric,
    Thank you for your answers. It will help to get me started,
    and is very helpful. I anticipate that a consulting session
    will be very useful; planning to schedule at a latter date.
    
    Thanks again. I think the course is going great.
    Earl
joyce Matlack
14 years ago

This video is not downloading for me right now.
- Eric
  14 years ago
  
  When you click on the Download Video link your browser might simply try to open it up in a new window.
  
  Try right-clicking on the Download Video link and selecting Save Link As.. or a similar option. This should work.
  
  Let me know if this resolves the problem.
James Satzinger
14 years ago

Eric,
I have not made suggestions for the webinars so far, but now have some for the future.
1. Since AC 13, the pet palettes have been harder to use. The node selection which I use often to change the shape of fills, slabs, roofs, etc. doesn’t want to hold but keeps defaulting to the move selection. Very frustrating. Some ideas?
2. When working on rendering in AC, establishing a workable lighting default would be very helpful. I spend a lot of time tweaking the lighting (sun) each time I begin rendering in a new project.
3. The door and window parts still accept materials in strange ways: i.e., the exterior and interior are inconsistent, spacing mullions that don’t accept two materials are required in multiple part windows. We talked about this one before. Maybe there is a work around you have discovered lately.
Jim S.
- Eric
  14 years ago
  
  Jim –
  
  Thanks for your suggestions.
  
  1. I have noticed that sometimes the pet palette default selection does not remember or reuse the last option, so it requires choosing the option again, which is annoying. I’ve also seen sometimes that the effective option (as evidenced by the ghost image or other behavior of the part being edited) is not matching the one that appears to be selected in the editing palette. The best (and only) way to deal with this that I’ve found is to select a different option in the editing palette, then reselect the desired one – then the editing operation can proceed as desired. I don’t have any other suggestions or workarounds at this point.
  
  2. I will be covering lighting for renderings in one of the course modules. I briefly touched on the topic of saving rendering settings in 3D Views in the View Map during our recent special coaching call (the one that was a bonus for people who contributed comments to the site). If you didn’t catch the live call, you can watch the recording – you should have gotten a link to this bonus page in an email (since you were on the list of people who posted on the site).
  
  3. I haven’t looked at this problem for a while. Perhaps you could send me a small PLN file with specific comments about the door and window parts that I could look at. This would be a good question for our next coaching call on Wednesday February 2.
  
  Eric
Earl Applegate
14 years ago

Eric,
I do believe the course is working very well; have re-read a couple of your AECbytes articles,
they are (now) understandable, and I can see how they fit into the process. Previous to the Best Practices Course I did not gain as much from reading them. Also, I have re-read the ArchiCad Master Template Manual and, once again, the information has more meaning, and am beginning to understand the process.

I am sure you will cover this, but I would like to better understand the differences between Model View Options and Layer Combinations. The ArchiCad Master Template Manual notes that the Model View Options are the most often misused, as also stated, it has been a great source of (my) confusion. I am certain that a clear understanding of the use of layers, layer combinations, and model view options is essential to the “best practices” process.

Also, in my confusion regarding the layer combinations and model view options I have made a number of changes to each. Is there a way to reset the Template to the settings that were originally designed by you.

Thanks for your help.

Earl
- Eric
  14 years ago
  
  Earl –
  
  Thanks for your note. I will devote one week of the course to looking at the View Map and how and why you use Model View Options and Layer Combinations and how they relate to each other.
  
  The only way to restore Layer Combinations or Model View Options to a previous state (as you are asking with regards to MasterTemplate) is to manually recreate the settings. There is no shortcut, nor any way to import or transfer them from one file to another other than “inheritance” – they are carried into a new file from the source (either a template or from the most recent settings).
  
  To facilitate recreating the settings, you can open up two instances of ArchiCAD, one will have open your current project or customized template, and the other will have the reference file (in this case, an unmodified version of MasterTemplate). You can open similar dialog boxes in each one (for example, the Layer Settings) and then flip back and forth to check and reset or recreate the settings. It may be tedious, but this is the only way to do it that I know of.
  
  As an alternative, you may find it easier to start your template customization over from scratch. In this case, you would take a clean copy of MasterTemplate and start to customize it, and have your previously customized (and “messed up”) version of the template open in a separate instance of ArchiCAD. Then you can flip back and forth and bring in your desired (“good”) customizations such as your title block info for the master layouts, etc. into the new version of the template you are creating “afresh”.
  
  I hope this helps you figure out a strategy to clean things up and move forward now that you are understanding things better.
  Eric
  - Earl Applegate
    14 years ago
    
    Thank You.
    
    Earl