Worksheet stripe rows - alternate colours

[Flair-Studio]

Hi,

I just figured out how easy it is on Revit to apply alternate colours to schedules wereas in Vectorworks it is very painful at the moment. 

 

I am currently working at very long door schedules at the moment (100 door instances) and it would be a real benefit for contractor to read these in alternate colours.

 

Unfortunately in VW you have to draw individual rectangles and place them at the back of the worksheet, spaced accordingly but then if you edit the worsheet it is just a nightmare.

 

In Revit you have to just tick a box in the info pallette, I would really love this feature could become available in VW, too!

 

Thank you

Federico

[line-weight]

You can give rows a background fill - highlight whole row, then format cells

 

 

Still rather tedious, but better than drawing rectangles.

[Tom W.]

29 minutes ago, line-weight said:

You can give rows a background fill - highlight whole row, then format cells

 

 

Still rather tedious, but better than drawing rectangles.

 

I think @Flair-Studio is talking about database reports. Here the whole report is highlighted. The least you can do is a single column. Spreadsheet rows you can highlight individually.

[Flair-Studio]

Thank you Tom I was referring to database worksheets like a door schedule.

 

Revit is soo much more intuitive for that...!

[Jesse Cogswell]

@Flair-Studio I am upvoting this post because I would very much to see a revamp / upgrade to worksheets in Vectorworks, but I do have a couple of workaround plug-ins that might help you.

 

The main plug-in in that post is for splitting worksheets so that they are easier to manage on the sheets.  From your post above saying that you are managing a door schedule with 100 entries, the split plug-in might be helpful to you.  What it essentially does is create smaller worksheets that reference the data in the source worksheet.  For non-database worksheets, it creates a direct reference link, so as the master worksheet is updated, the split worksheets will follow.  This doesn't quite work with database worksheets, so my plug-in instead copies the database data as absolute data in the split worksheets.  This means that updating the master worksheet will have no affect on the split worksheets.  However, if you run the command and select a master worksheet that already has splits, there is an option to overwrite the splits, which will the track across to any worksheets on a layer, so it's pretty convenient to update splits.

 

There is another plug-in in that post that will "stripe" worksheets, letting you choose a color for odd rows and a color for even rows.  This normally won't work on database rows, but if you use the Split tool, the resulting splits are not database rows, so the stripe tool will work on them.

 

I wrote those plug-ins before I had gotten used to putting images (such as symbol images) into worksheets, so I don't think it will transfer the images over at the moment.  If this is something you might need, I can look into adding that functionality.

[Flair-Studio]

9 hours ago, Jesse Cogswell said:

@Flair-Studio I am upvoting this post because I would very much to see a revamp / upgrade to worksheets in Vectorworks, but I do have a couple of workaround plug-ins that might help you.

Thank you @Jesse Cogswell you are such a star! Totally agree those features you have developed should be integrated within the new VW releases together with an overhaul of the worksheet environment, formatting, etc.

 

Sorry I am having troubles installing the VSM plugins on my machine, I had to create the plug-ins folder within the vectorworks2024 folder from the Library as it wasn't there already, but when I go to the edit workspaces the commands don't show... Could you please advise?

 

[Flair-Studio]

@Jesse Cogswell Sorry disregard I just managed to install both plug-ins can't wait to use them thanks