Schedule modification

Andrea,

We do have an existing wishlist item to improve the Unit display for RefNotes. Combined with it, is the ability to apply a Quantity Multiplier, similar to what we have for Flat quantities with Planting. We were not planning on splitting the Unit out to a separate column, but I'll see if this can be done as at least an option.
You mentioned reordering the column, but you didn't say to what aim or result.
If you have screenshots of your desired look and organization for each schedule, that always helps us the most in understanding what you are after.

--J

That would be great!

As far as the UNIT separation, we routinely have to remove the "sf" suffix from our sod counts on our plant labels and manually write SF elsewhere on the label because the size of the plant label gets thrown off by the "sf" at the end and it doesn't fit our plant labels correctly. From a schedule perspective (RefNote and Planting) it makes sense in the schedule to separate out the multiplier especially if showing cost as you would in a normal budgeting table, that makes it clear which items are being billed per unit and which are being billed per measurement.

In some instances we work with certain entities like DOTs that are prescriptive in the order they would like their tables to be organized in order to comply with their standards. For FDOT, which is what I'm working on now and setting preference sets which are compliant with their standards, they would like their schedules to be organized as:

SYMBOL/CODE | QUANTITY | UNIT | DESCRIPTION/REMARKS

So are they requiring the Unit column in just the budget table, or both there and in the drawing? It certainly makes sense in a budget table, and in our schedules exported to a spreadsheet, where that is easier to implement. But note that your example has the description before the quantity just like ours, yet you stated the quantity and unit are to be before the description -- so which is the more appropriate standard?
As for the plant label, that appears to be more of an issue with the label design. You could see about having the quantity be a multi-line attribute, to get the "sf" dropped to the next line. But I just don't see how it is acceptable to have a quantity without "sf" in the label. If one is to be labeling such areas, the label design needs to accommodate it. Typically the easiest is to modify just the -Left label, so that quantity has more room to spill out, meaning that sod areas just need to be labeled from the left side.

--J

I included that image to show how a UNIT column would be useful.

FDOT standards would call for a table that looks sort of like this:

with the information on the tabulation of quantities image I've attached (as mentioned before). For reference I've also attached what a plant list for FDOT looks like.

Regarding plant labels, we are showing that it's SF right there in the label in the container option so it's redundant to have it next to the quantity. Our label design accommodates all the container sizes within the label itself. It is also sometimes not possible to label to the left as we work on large plans and we might be labeling a corner of sod that can only be labeled to the right, so that really becomes more of band aid solution. I've attached a jpg of what our labels look like if we don't go through and manually erase the "sf" off the sod labels, as you can see, the quantity does not fit in the label but it doesn't make sense to make the label wider because it would affect our whole plant palette not just the sod and the SF marking is redundant. Maybe it's just an option of turning that on/off?

I'm still a bit fuzzy -- this is absolutely required for the schedule on the plan, or can it be for just when sending the schedule to a Spreadsheet?

I'm also still confused on the necessity of the column order. Your previous post said FDOT required "Item, Quantity, Unit, Description", and this plant schedule shows "Item, Description, Unit, Quantity". So is FDOT open to accepting that as long as Unit is a separate column, or does it have to be with Description last?

As for the label, I still personally disagree, but oh well -- I think it's wildly non-standard and confusing to have a container size be "SF", and to have to use that for any groundcover that is called out in square feet.
If any of this was a current option that could be turned off, I would have told you that by now! We are discussing possible future options, and I'm just trying to wrap my brain around it. It's a matter of what the option should be called, where to put it, what the default should be, and so on. For the schedule, the easy solution is to have Units automatically as a column when sending to a Spreadsheet. To have it in the schedule in the drawing, I can see shoe-horning in a "Units" option next to the "Quantity" checkbox.
And for the label... I suppose something like an option in Preferences, called "Display area units", or something like that.
Or perhaps more of a single overall option, for the Numeric preferences, having "Units as separate column". But this feels odd to impact the plant label, so there is still that to figure out.

So things to ponder!

--J

I understand we are talking about future improvements.

If there are any current better practices I could use as far as the RefNotes schedule now, I would appreciate them. This "tabulation of quantities" goes in the plan itself. I've attached an image of what our end goal is. I've achieved this by adding a user field for UNIT. Then I ran a RefNotes schedule which organized the columns into:

SYMBOL | DESCRIPTION | QTY | UNIT

Since this is not the correct order I exploded the RefNotes schedule, manually input 2 columns before the DESCRIPTION column, copied over the data from the QTY and UNIT columns to these two new columns and deleted the original columns. I have to do this every time I re-run the schedule because I need the schedule columns to be organized specifically in that order.

As you can see, this leaves a lot of room for mishaps and is less efficient than being able to simply rearrange the order of the columns. Can you help me with this?

Andrea,

The easiest option to add, would be a "Unit" option in the RefNote Schedule dialog box, and I can see it having options of "Suffix" or "Column".
An option of "Quantity Before Description" to match the similar option in the Plant Schedule would be next, and require a bit of moving code around.
Then I imagine a similar "Unit" option in the Plant Schedule would round it out.

In the meantime, it appears you might be able to pull this off by placing the schedule into Modelspace, and having four adjacent Viewports, each looking at just a single column, but in the preferred order.

--J