How do people format their notes in Notes Manager?

[Christiaan]

I've never particularly liked the Notes Manager.

For one thing it encourages one to format notes in a computer-friendly way rather than a natural language way. i.e. it encourages one to put the specification reference before the note, so for example:

F10/5A FACING BRICKWORK

This would fine if "F10/5A" was the primary reference but it's not. The keynote system appends its own number to the front of this, so it will read:

1. F10/5A FACING BRICKWORK

Our preference with this system is for the note to read like so:

1. FACING BRICKWORK AS F10/5A

The implication of this?as you can see in the screenshots?is that the notes in the Notes Manager window are more difficult to scan because you only see the reference and not the whole note, unless you click on it.

I guess our preference for an updated Notes Manager would probably be:

F10/5A FACING BRICKWORK (with our "F10/5A" constituting the primary reference)

How do others view this issue? Any comments on historic conventions? Any view on how other software works? Any view on how you'd rather VW worked?

[Christiaan]

As usual Cadimage Tools seems to get this right with their Keynotes tool: http://www.cadimageworld.com/products/tools/keynotes

Judging by their support documents it appears the user has full control over the primary reference (what they refer to as the Key) and which can be anything up to 32 characters, and a separate field for the spec ref:

http://help.cadimagetools.com/release-report-key-2#key-editing-key-notes-within-the-project-

[Jeffrey W Ouellette]

Christiaan,

Try reading the documentation on using Callouts as Keynotes.

This should overcome your problem.

Just setup a Keynote Legend where the Callout display is the Note Description, not Numbers, Letters, or the Note.

[J Lucas]

Christiaan,

Are you simply referencing keynotes to drawings or are you referencing keynotes to drawings to details or specs? It seems that your keynote format preference would make it difficult for a builder to go from a callout on a drawing to finding the keynote in the keynote legend.

[Christiaan]

Try reading the documentation on using Callouts as Keynotes.

This should overcome your problem.

Just setup a Keynote Legend where the Callout display is the Note Description, not Numbers, Letters, or the Note.

I read it religiously (not that that always helps) but I'm guessing you're talking about something new in v2010 perhaps?

[Christiaan]

I've had a look at v2010 and it's just what I want. I've since commented on the NBS blog about it: http://constructioncode.blogspot.com/2010/07/exporting-nbs-annotations-to.html?showComment=1279892906191#c6099186875113366486