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Contents
Worksheets are like simple spreadsheets. Worksheets allow you to calculate and report information in your Vectorworks files. This is a powerful technique. It has been available in Vectorworks for many years.
You can use worksheets to find objects, report them, and do calculations on the objects that have been found.
Worksheets are set up to look for specific information. It uses Criteria to define what the search looks for. When Vectorworks finds that information it fills in the worksheet.
When you are setting up the worksheets, it is important to plan your report. There are so many options—you have to have some idea of how you are going to find the information in your file. For example, if you are creating a report to find the site area, you could look for a property line object. If there is more than one property line, then you might look for one on a particular class. You could name the object and use the name to find it. As you can see, even with a simple object, there are so many choices. It is best to think about all of this before you get started.
The most powerful worksheets in Vectorworks are databases linked to Symbols or Plug-in Objects listing the data entered in different fields. As you add these objects into the file, you can update the worksheet and check the information. An example of this would be a bracing spreadsheet that tracks the bracing objects in a drawing. As you add bracing objects, the worksheet tracks the number, type and length of the brace and puts this information into the worksheet, telling you if you have achieved enough bracing in each direction. Another example is a plant report. As plants are added to the design, they will automatically be added to the report when it is updated.
One of the powerful things about worksheets is that they are a resource that can be copied from one file to another. Although a worksheet often takes a lot of work to create, the time taken is well spent because you can use it on multiple projects.
Worksheets in Vectorworks are powerful and can be programmed to search for information in different ways. We can search for information by pen color, weight, line style, class, layer, kind, etc. You can even search for named objects.
In this file, I have a site plan (property line) and a house plan (the rectangle).
We want to build a worksheet that will find these two elements, report their areas in a useful format and calculate the site coverage. In this case, we will be using the name of the house object and the object type and class for the site area.
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The worksheet will open in a separate floating window on the screen. The worksheet window may be too small to allow you to see all the cells.
Vectorworks will accept what you have typed in. If you make a mistake, click on the red cross, Vectorworks will revert to whatever was there before you did any typing.
You may find that the text spills out of the cells and into the next cell.
Now your worksheet window will have the area and the name. It is not a formula yet, so Vectorworks will not yet put in the number.
Now for the site coverage calculation:
The completed Worksheet
I call this the database method because it uses the data attached to objects.
In this example, I will be using a plant list that will find plants. This technique can be applied to any object that has data attached, not just plants. Previous manuals used this technique to look for doors or windows on an architectural plan. This is one of the most powerful techniques for creating worksheets: You can search for the information, there’s a database attached, and you can filter the information based on the database results. For example, we might want to have a plant list that only counts trees. We could first search for objects that have the plant database attached and then add an additional criteria that looks only for plants that are in the category “Trees.”
Another example would be that you can create a report that looks for all windows in a project. You could then report all the information that you require from each window, such as window number, window size, lintel size, opening configuration, etc.
Vectorworks has a premade plant list that will look for all the plants in your file. In this example, I will not be using that plant list. I will show you how to create your own. I only do this so that you can see how one of these reports is made. The most efficient way to create your plant list is to use the premade one from Vectorworks.
This example will create a new worksheet. Instead of using the Resource Manager to create the worksheet, we will use a command from the menu bar.
This is a common report that is needed to show the total area of the site that has impermeable surfaces (paving, building, roads, decks, patios, etc.).
This worksheet is a development of the first exercise. Instead of just looking for two parts (the site and the house), we need to look for several parts (site, building, roads, paving, patios). In some locations, this worksheet is required by city planning. In Auckland, New Zealand, this is required for building approval.
Here is the definition from the Auckland City Council unitary plan:
The first step would be to design your report. We need to calculate the roof area (projected onto the site plan), paved areas, paved courts, roads, and engineered layers. The first option might be to use the roof object for the projected area of the building, the property line for the site area, and a single class for all the impervious areas. While this might work in some situations, there might be other situations where we would want to see the road but not other paved areas, or the patios (decks) but not the road. Therefore, will need to have more than one class to help us to create the drawings.
As I said earlier, the first step is to design your report.
In this case, we might use classes to find the parts for the report. For example, I will be creating paving, roading, and hardscape classes. The strategy is to work out how many parts are needed to create the report and whether you need a separate class for each part:
This is a local example to show how you can take a building requirement and make that into a worksheet. Projects in New Zealand need to have a risk matrix for weather tightness to show whether the building is required to have a ventilated cavity or not. This risk matrix is given in an Acceptable Solution (E2/AS1).
In situations like this, it is often useful to create a worksheet that can be incorporated into your drawings rather than using another spreadsheet program or a photocopy of the original document.
The aim is to make the worksheet look like the table shown in the Acceptable Solution.
This looks like a complex worksheet to set up because there are so many parts. It does have a lot of parts, but the mathematics is simple: add up the rows and sum up the column at the end. The most difficult part of the worksheet is formatting the worksheet to look like this.
Start by counting how many rows and columns will be needed. It is easy to get this wrong, remember to count the maximum number of rows, rather than counting the rows across the headings.
I counted 9 rows and 10 columns.
You can report objects based on the layer, class, line weight, line color, fill style, etc. You can use a combination of criteria. This allows you to create sophisticated search criteria for your objects. One of the less common criteria is called Location.
Location looks for a polygon with a name and determines if the object is located inside the polygon.
When you create your report, make sure that you use the Location option and then you can choose the name of your polygon. In this example, I named each polygon to represent a room number—this was to make it easy for me to remember what the polygon names were.
This image shows the criteria for finding my objects. Notice that I had a specific layer for all of my furniture and that I had an Asset Database record attached to each of my objects.
You can name objects by using the Object Info palette.
Any objects that I move inside the polygon for Room 1 will show up on my report when it is recalculated. If I move the objects from Room 1 to Room 2, you will see them move on the report from Room 1 to Room 2.
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Hi can I download this as a pdf? I have done with other manuals and its my preferred way to do it for offline reading.
Regards
Mike