Plant attributes change when they shouldn't

[dhbrown]

This has been a problem for awhile but today it's the worse; I have 45 different plants on my large layout. When I go back to edit a plant because the schedule size or cost is wrong, the fill on this plant reverts back to the default!!! ARGH!!! Or the spread of it changes to something huge!!! Then I must go back to edit the plant again, trying to remember what I had it set as, not to mention I must 'activate layer', and 'activate class' to get to the plant!!! This is really slowing me down...and driving me crazy! We really want to have the plantlist on the dwg, otherwise it would be SOOOO much easier to just use Excel to create my lists....Can anyone out there tell me how to solve this problem within VW? (please don't say export the list to Excel, make my changes, import it back in....we bought VW to do all that) Thanks a bunch in advance...

[Guest]

What version of VW ?

To select a plant in any version of VW 12 (assuming you have some version of 12) from the worksheet, right click on the row and choose "Select". This will go out and adjust the active class and/or layer, select the object, and center it on the screen.

(by the way, with two-way worksheets in VectorWorks 2008, you don't have to go back to the object to make a change like scheduled size or cost - you can override the change in the worksheet itself)

[dhbrown]

The version we have is VW 12.5.2. The "select" command doesn't work if you have more than 1 group of plants ie. a group of 3 irises here, a group of 5 of the same irises over there, etc. It works only when the same type of plant is all together, which does me no good since the difficulty comes when I'm usually looking for all of them; if there was only 1 group, it would be easy for me to find.

[dhbrown]

I think I figured out part of my problem: I have been doing my editing from the Edit Plant (top toolbar), since I generally want the changes I make to affect all of the plants on the dwg. However, my boss said he has been editing the plants ie fills, scheduled sizes, spreads, by the 'Obj Info > Data table', specifically on some groups of plants. So each time I go in to make an unrelated change in the Edit Plant table, the defaults are popping back! If the default for a plant was NONE, and he changed it to pink, and I come along and change the cost, after I click all of the OK's, the plant symbol reverts back to NONE. HOW DO I STOP IT FROM DOING THAT?? I don't believe the software should be changing anything that we haven't purposefully changed. This requires alot of time for me to look the dwg over before I print it to be sure nothing has changed that I didn't want changed.

[Petri]

This sounds exactly like my experience: any change will undo everything you've done so far.

One of the reasons why I don't use or recommend the Plant tool.

[dhbrown]

Petri, what do you use instead? Do you create your own symbols but use something like Excel?

[dhbrown]

Another thing we discovered while using the Data in the Obj Info to edit plants, if you change the cost of a plant/group of plants from there, then you must also do the math of the cost x the number of plants in that group, and enter it in the Extended Price in that Data box. Otherwise, your price and/or extended prices will not add up correctly on the plant list. This is getting more and more cumbersome.