worksheet archeology

[jnr]

why can I not adjust the height of a worksheet row as I can in Excel? (the worksheet won't fit on the page and I need to rescale)

why does the worksheet not have word wrap?

why does the worksheet not have multiple cell selection as a feature? Excel does.

why was it "dumbed down" in the last release?

[Guest]

What was dumbed down about it?

[jnr]

I got confused. It was text editing that was dumbed down by your engineers in the last release because the Mac OS could not handle text editing possible on the Windows platform. The text editor while improved, is still deficient. For comparision go look at autocad 2000.

What about cell/row height, word wrap, multiple cell selection?

[jfmarch]

if you like autocad so much, then go back to using it.

cell heights are controlled by text height. word wrap is not an issue for us. the text editor, i think, works fine. its a one stop place to deal with fonts. resizing the rows/columns is a good feature for making the schedule fit on a page. sometime, though, we 'rotate' the sheet if the schedule become to long to fit on a horizontal format.

for what it is, vw worksheets work pretty good. i'm a former acad user and i'd be hard pressed to have to go back using it.

[Thom]

I cannot get the worksheets to rotate. What is the secret?

thks

[jfmarch]

Worksheets cannot be rotated. What we do is 'rotate' the sheet they are plotted on. Instead of landscape, we use portrait format, when the worksheet is to long to fit. I creat a layer link of the title block and rotate that. works pretty good.

[jnr]

McAuliffe:

After using programs like Excel, which blow away the worksheet capabilities of this program, its easy to get very frustrated with the worksheets. To note that Autocad has better text editing capabilities was used to illustrate that there is room for improvement in this program. And NO, it does not mean I want to revert to using that program. Furthermore, if NNA were to get on the bus and make the program capable of linking files to other programs (go look at InDesign or Archicad), then this discussion would be moot and you would not be jumping through hoops to rotate your sheets.

[propstuff]

It seems a little unfair to compare to compare VW worksheets with Excel. Apart from being, by all accounts, an excelent piece of software (and by some accounts the only piece of decent software ever written by MS :-)), It's a specific, dedicated spreadsheet app and will always be "better" than an ancilliary function of a different software app.

By way of comparison, I suspect Excel's handling of 3D geometry and precision drafting is rather poor. :-0

(Apart from the necessity to purchase another, different application), saving the development effort on the worksheets and spending it on linkability might be money well spent????

Do users WANT to work spreadsheets INSIDE VW, or would they be happy to buy another product and gain more functionality?

Yes I know; the answer is they really want ALL of the functions of Excel INSIDE VW ;-))

Just my 2c

N.

[jnr]

I'll vote for outside, and linked to VW any day of the week. It keeps files smaller and like a program such as InDesign, takes advantage of the other program's power (in this case Excel). Archicad, VW's main competitor on the Mac, already does this.

[jfmarch]

jnr: i stand by my comments. if you are into spreadsheets, than yes Excel is the way to go. Since we are architects, and we like to design buildings and create working drawings, we use VW. the worksheet feature is not Excel, nor do we think it should be. as a way to express databases, or other text in a grid, it works fine. Having control over row heights does not make any difference when you are designing buildings and creating construction drawings. having a 'hot linked' door schedule, though, is.

propstuff: I agree with you. i like your 2c.

[krw]

you can import an excel sheet into a vw worksheet. this works if you want to format in excel. it can be a problem if you have to update often, or you can just update the vw worksheet once you've got the format.

I agree about the text wrap and have stated so in the wish list forum. We use worksheets for notes because the look is cleaner than a text block for a numbered list. However it gets annoying to start typing and have to remember to check every 15 words that i haven't gone ouside the worksheet boundary. I would love text wrap. It could be a setting to turn off/on when needed.

[Petri Sakkinen]

Any spreadsheet is awkward and limited and in the end, useless. Whenever the capabilities of the VW worksheet are not enough, I export the data and process them with FileMaker Pro.

OK: I'm lying: last week, I had to use Excel, because of the idiosyncracies of a project that necessitated a 'combination' worksheet of two data sets from VW AND the need to send the worksheet to a steel fabricator n Excel format.

However, it would be nice to have ODBC-capablity in VW - but it won't be cheap.

[jnr]

Petri:

Do you re-import the data back to Vectorworks?

I would pay the difference to have the ODBC capability as it would save me a ton of time. People seem to spend a lot of time obsessing about the cost of software on these boards, yet it pales in comparision to the cost of labor.

[ccroft]

So for you it would be worth the cost. For me it probably wouldn't.

My business depends on the database/worksheet feature in v-works. I'm in cabinetmaking and all my material take-offs and estimating are handled very nicely by the program the way it is. Personally I couldn't care less about formatting options as nobody sees these sheets but me.

So I guess it's a business decision that Nemetschek has to make....will enough people pay for ODBC to make it worthwhile?

The relatively low cost of this program is what attracted me to it in the first place.

I don't think it's realistic to compare features in one app. to another that costs 2 to 3 times as much.

Imagine the features you could have if enough people were willing to pay $25,000 per seat (roughly the cost of the top of the line cabinet-shop software).

That said, it doesn't hurt to let Nemetshek know where you stand. ODBC is something that continually comes up here, on the wish list, and on the v-script and v-works mailing lists. Maybe someday it will be an add-on feature that we can pay for if we want it.

[Petri Sakkinen]

quote:

---

Originally posted by jnr:

Petri:

(1) Do you re-import the data back to Vectorworks?

(2) I would pay the difference to have the ODBC capability as it would save me a ton of time. People seem to spend a lot of time obsessing about the cost of software on these boards, yet it pales in comparision to the cost of labor.

---

(1) Occasionally, but not often. In this respect, there is a fundamental problem with VW: entities do not have a persistent, unambiguous internal ID, so import has to rely either on named objects or geographic operands. The former are fine, but laborious to establish, the latter are unreliable and only useful in certain (simple) circumstances.

(2) You would, would you? Well, for many years, I have tried to sell various VW add-ons (as have many others) with little success. The VW folks are notoriously price-sensitive: a few months ago, an independent developer wanted to find ou if there is demand for a product he had in mind (on VectorDepot forum). The response was: yes, we want that, but it should be free.

Now, my offerings perhaps have not been relevant to a large number of people, but in my correspondence with people who appear to require a specific feature (such as export to MapInfo), mentioning the war, uhhm, the price, has always resulted in total silence in the other end.

(Typos, typos and more typos...)

[ 06-06-2003, 10:12 AM: Message edited by: Petri Sakkinen ]

[defjef]

Having the ability to "link" to an excel spread sheet, much the way ACAD does would AUGMENT the program for those who want a more powerful spreadsheet. For those that are content with the features of the VW worksheet, leave that feature in. Personally, I find the Excel spread sheets much easy to work with, more powerful, interms of formatting. What I do is copy and paste the spread sheets, which is a STATIC example of the spread sheet at the time of copy... If I update the spread sheet, I neet to copy and paste again to insert the current version of the spread sheet.

This is a pain... and waste of time. An external refence / dynamic link would GREATLY enhance the way I use Excel in conjuction with VW.

I dont think VW should necessarily make their worksheet more powerful, but I do think they should implement some sort of ex ref / dynamic link. That would be a real productivity feature.