What Is a Worksheet?

Worksheets are like simple spreadsheets. Worksheets allow you to calculate and report information from 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.

How Do Worksheets Work?
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 then use that 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.
What Types of Worksheets Are There?
We can classify the worksheets into a few different groups depending on the nature of the worksheets:

• Count/select objects (typically symbols) throughout the file. They do not need to have a record attached or be on the same Class or Layer. We can choose to count symbols on a specific layer or assigned to a specific class.
• Do mathematical operations with the parameters of drawn objects: areas, perimeters, volumes, etc. Name the objects (Object Info palette) and find their properties and their combinations.
• Create reports using symbols with records and list the field values from the symbols in the report.

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Examples of Worksheets

In this example, we will expand on the concept of worksheets by creating two worksheets. The first worksheet will perform the impermeable surface calculations for a site and create the E2 risk matrix for wall elevations.

Landscape Counting

You can use classes to count specific sorts of objects. In this exercise, we want to add some complexity to the worksheet. Let me explain, we have a project with four sites on it. For each site, we want to count the plants, hard landscaping, the grassy areas, and the volume of topsoil.

When you count objects or place them on a schedule in Vectorworks, you can define the objects that you want by using what Vectorworks calls criteria. You can think of criteria as filters. Criteria can be layers, classes, object types, colors and so on. You can even use the information attached to objects as criteria. If you set up the criteria (filter) correctly, you can capture just the data you want. If you do not set up the criteria correctly, you will get unreliable data in your worksheet.

 
 

Building Occupancy for Car Parking and Fire Occupancy

Sometimes you have to calculate the building occupancy based on the overall area of the building. In this situation, you need to quickly find the gross area of the building and apply a ratio to this to calculate the car parking.

 

Rounding to the Next Whole Number

There are times when you need to round the results in the worksheets, but you need to round the result up to the nearest whole number. In this example, I will be using a roof area calculation to demonstrate the issue and solution. Worksheets can use IF statements. IF statements are conditional statements that give a different answer depending on the input.
 

Sorting Objects in a Database Worksheet

In this example, we have several framing member objects. They are different sizes and lengths. If we wanted to sort them based on width, we could use a different class for each one. If we wanted to sort them by height and length, the class system would get too complex. There is a better way—using built-in sorting options.
 

Worksheets to Find Objects in a Location

 
 
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