Recalculate Worksheet Indicator?

[Bruce Kieffer]

Is there some type of visual indicator that shows that a worksheet needs to be updated?

[michaelk]

Nope.

[Bruce Kieffer]

Hey MK. No indicator, so is there a way to set a worksheet to auto update? I'm trying to think of a logical reason why a person would not always want a worksheet up to date, and I can't think of any.

[michaelk]

Oh, boy.  I can!!!!

 

I'm pretty sure that worksheets are still single threaded operations.  If you have a lot of worksheets.  Think 100 or more that have databases pulling data from 100s or 1000s of objects. It would slow your drawing to a crawl if every time you dragged an object or changed something in the OIP it had to update every worksheet.

 

That's probably why they added the new command to update only the active worksheet.  With a lot of worksheets updating all of them can give you an unexpected break in your workday.

 

There is a checkbox when publishing or printing to recalculate all worksheets.

[Bruce Kieffer]

Good reason, so I think an updated required indicator would be a good wish list item. I will post it there.

[Pat Stanford]

Don't hold your breath Bruce. A worksheet has no way of knowing it is out of date unless it checks every time anything in the drawing is modified. And even if it did, unless is basically recalculates, how would it know a new object you have added to the drawing should be included?

 

I suppose this could run as some sort of background process, but I doubt it is high on the priority list.

[Bruce Kieffer]

42 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

Don't hold your breath Bruce. A worksheet has no way of knowing it is out of date unless it checks every time anything in the drawing is modified. And even if it did, unless is basically recalculates, how would it know a new object you have added to the drawing should be included?

 

I suppose this could run as some sort of background process, but I doubt it is high on the priority list.

 

This only leaves one option, the user has to always assume the worksheet is out-of-date, and when the worksheet is needed the user has to manually tell it to recalculate. That is both inefficient and risky (another thing for my old brain to try and remember, good luck with that!). I hope the Vectorworks engineers can come up with an indicator to show the user it's time to recalculate the worksheet. I did add this to the wish list.

[TKA]

I wonder if there could be improvements:

1.  Have a separate button @ top of spreadsheet to recalculate as opposed to scroll down menu.

2.  I understand "one way street" with worksheet, but I wonder if a change to any data base object could trigger recalculate button to go red, even if it doesn't belong to the particular spreadsheet - a reminder of sorts update.

 

[halfcoupler]

12 hours ago, TKA said:

1.  Have a separate button @ top of spreadsheet to recalculate as opposed to scroll down menu.

 

That's a very good idea !  I guess it's easy to implement, and a real time saver !

[milezee]

could a worksheet just have a highlighted border just like slvp's do to indicate update ??  

[halfcoupler]

As Pat explained, a worksheet can't know that it needs to be updated. Maybe a worksheet can be compared to an excel-sheet that is populated monthly with invoice data, which is exported from an accounts-package-software. The excel sheet does not know that a new month has begun or that there are new invoices that need to be exported. You have to go to the accouts package manually and press the button to export the data.

[Bruce Kieffer]

I do not dispute what Pat said. Here's how I feel: If I have a worksheet that counts symbols in my drawing, and I add an instance of a symbol, then I know the worksheet needs to be updated. Vectorworks should be smart enough to know too.

Edited March 30, 2020 by Bruce Kieffer