Editable Worksheet

[Eric Chenault]

I was excited to hear that v9 worksheets are able to be editable. Then I tried one ...

Why can't I just edit the Instrument Schedule or the Channel Hookup and have the results update the drawing?

Right now Spotlight can only create one editable worksheet ... so in use here is what I tried:

An editable worksheet with

- Position

- Unit Number

- Purpose

Sort by Positon

Result: all the lights sorted by position with their unit numbers all out of order. (Obviously we need to be able to sort by positon and then by unit number).

SECOND ATTEMPT:

- Unit Number

- Purpose

Result: all the lights sorted by unit number, except here is the order VW sorts by:

1

10

11

12

13

2

20

3

30

etc ...

why not 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10?

[kmoore1]

quote:

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Originally posted by Eric Chenault:

I was excited to hear that v9 worksheets are able to be editable. Then I tried one ...

Why can't I just edit the Instrument Schedule or the Channel Hookup and have the results update the drawing?

---

There were a couple of reasons for this. First, it would require that you generate a complete channel hookup with all x hundred instruments to edit the information for the dozen instruments you are interested in. With a seperate command you can make a selection of instruments and edit just that information, or make no selection and edit all the instruments. Second, it would have required some technical restructuring of the paperwork generation command to implement and the time to do this and properly test the implications was just not available. Third, the way the editable worksheet keeps track of which instrument is which is through the unique ID which it inserts in column A of the editable worksheet. I then set the column width to zero to hide this column. If this field were added to all of the paperwork schedules and similarly hidden it would still print either a vertical line at the side of the paperwork or dots down the left side at each row intersection.

quote:

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SECOND ATTEMPT:

- Unit Number

- Purpose

Result: all the lights sorted by unit number, except here is the order VW sorts by:

1, 10, 11... 2, 20, 21,...

---

This is the reason that the paperwork command takes so long, had problems under 8.52, and would have required alot of work to get editable worksheets into. The unit number field in the lighting instrument is a text field so that it can accept unit numbers like 1a, 2b, etc. Because of this, VectorWorks treats it as an alphabetic field and sorts it alphabetically. So 10 comes before 2 when you sort this way. I wrote an algorithm for SpotLight to process the unit number and turn it into a string that would sort correctly by padding spaces at the front of the number.(you'll notice the alt-chan, alt-dim, alt-unit, alt-cir fields at the end of the instrument's record info) SpotLight uses these fields to key its sorting for paperwork. You could add the alt-unit field to your worksheet and use that to get a list that was correctly sorted by unit number.

Multi-field sorting, intelligent sorting, remembering column choice and order, using the selected position to edit all instruments on the position, and possible integration with the paperwork command are all wish-list items that are under consideration for future versions of SpotLight.

In my original design for SpotLight 8.52 I thought that the Find & Modify command would make the editable worksheet mostly unnecessary. I was wrong. My other reason for eliminating the command was that previous versions of the command had a clumsy user interface and relied too much on the user to keep track of where the good data was.

The beta testers of SpotLight 8.52 said they missed the feature but at that point in the process it was too late to add the feature in time for 8.52. After comments from the beta testers and early SpotLight users I felt it was important enough to get it into 9 as it stands rather than having it be bumped to a future release with better functionality.

Thanks for the comments, I'll make sure we get these on the list of things to fix.

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Kevin Moore

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Product Manager

VectorWorks SpotLight

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[This message has been edited by kmoore1 (edited 09-05-2001).]