Why are Wattage and Weight Still Text Fields?

[James Russell]

I had this rage about 5 years ago about the wattage and weight fields for VW Spotlight being text fields by default.

Back in VW 2008 you used to be able to edit the Lighting Device.vso, change the field from Text to Integer and then you'd have to go through your entire library and make some changes to lamp figures (not an impossible task but a painful one still).

Now days the spotlight preferences seem to lock these fields to text, which is incredibly dull.

My question is why?

We have so much capability for:

- Dimmer Loading Calculators

- Truss Weight Loading

- Phase Loading

- Point Load Calculations

All within our smart two-way spreadsheet system.

Just makes me a little angry.

[klinzey]

They are still text because VW does not recognize units of mass or power.

It becomes a major issue when when multiple units of measurements are used in the same field.

For example wattage, it a user enters 750 and 7.5, Vectorworks has no way of knowing if you intend for that to be 750W, 750KW , 7.5KW or 7.5W and the when you try to add those numbers together you will get 757.5(?).

Till Vectorworks has a system wide method of dealing with units of mass and power like we have with dimensions it's not a good idea to allow users to unit-less values and preform calculations. There is just too much risk of bad data creating disastrous results.

[bcd]

In the meantime you can convert the text value to a numeric value in your worksheet:

eg

=VALUE(B3) returns the numeric value of B3 where B3 is Wattage as a text field.

[James Russell]

Thanks for your responses guys.

@Klinzey - Totally hearing you and wishing that all units could potentially be added one day soon. Knew this was the case but was hoping to raise awareness of some of the issues I'm facing with my clients who wish to do load ratings and power calculations without taking the figures somewhere else.

@bcd - I've used the =value(x) to solve most of the problems created from the ~2012 shift to current versions where Lighting Devices have been restrained in the locking of the field type. I was kind of hoping soon VW would implement an equivalent to Excel's RIGHT and LEFT commands, allowing you to remove sections of strings by length (in an attempt to remove the W for example from 750W and then running the value over the top to avoid mass library changes).

As with every year I'll keep flagging this as a desire from down under.

[C. Andrew Dunning]

Resurrecting an old thread...

Where appropriate, the new releases of the Landru Design Entertainment/Production-oriented tools track Weight in both kilograms and U.S. pounds.

A few notes:

- The chosen drawing units will determine which Weight unit gets displayed. If the drawing units are Imperial, U.S. pounds get displayed. If the drawing units are Metric, kilograms get displayed.

- The Weight field formats are numbers, so Worksheet calculations will work.

- For the VideoScreen 4 tools, the updated record attached to each of the external Resources (televisions, projectors, and stands) has been expanded to include Weight. Users who take advantage of the new television and projector models (We HIGHLY recommend their replacing their old versions with the new...), suggested weight information will import along with the model geometry and will be inserted in the OIP.

- For the Audio ToolSet 2 tools, previously-inserted instances and Library entries will update the previous "unitless" Weight values to both kilograms and U.S. pounds on-the-fly, allowing users to choose which unit had been intended when the objects were initially created.

See this Tech Board post or our Plug-Ins page for more info.