jmaclights077 Posted March 27, 2021 Share Posted March 27, 2021 Hello Everyone. I have a problem, that I hope you can help me with. I made my dmx address sheet with 269 Fixtures and at the time of managing my layher sheet it made it a large size See attached message. Have any experienced this problem? Best from Jmac 🤘😎 Quote Link to comment
Sam Jones Posted March 27, 2021 Share Posted March 27, 2021 I don't see an attached message. Quote Link to comment
Jesse Cogswell Posted March 27, 2021 Share Posted March 27, 2021 I'm a bit confused as to what your question is. If you make a worksheet with 269 fixtures it will have 269 rows (270 with a header). That is indeed a big worksheet. If you're trying to get it to fit on a sheet layer, you can use the Scale Factor field in the Object Info Palette to scale down the size of the worksheet, but it might make it illegible or hard to read. There's not really a way to split the worksheet up into multiple columns to spread the data out without making more than one worksheet. I have done this in the past by having a "master worksheet" that I then duplicate multiple times and delete some of the row data.  Let's say that you want each of the printed instances to be 100 rows. You would have four worksheets (Master, Rows 1-100, Rows 101-200, Rows 201-269) with the not needed rows deleted. The bummer of this is that this only works with a non-databased worksheet, so you would lose the ability to keep it dynamically updated.  If you are using Database rows to make your spreadsheet, one "relatively" simple method would be to utilize the Mark field of the Lighting Device objects. Add a column to the worksheet set to ='Lighting Device'.'Mark'. Set the value to something like "A" for the first hundred, "B" for the second, "C" for the remaining (Pro-tip, to quickly fill out this column, fill in the first row, copy the cell, select the remaining 99 rows and paste). Once each row has their Mark column set, you can delete the column. Then edit your database criteria to look for objects with Lighting Device records present, and Mark field values set to A. Duplicate the sheet and change the criteria to Mark B. Then duplicate again with criteria set to Mark C. This will allow you to spread your data out between multiple worksheets to separate them by page or to make more than one "column" as seen in the below screenshot. The major caveat is that you will need to remember to set the Mark field for any fixtures added after making the worksheets.   Or did I miss the point entirely and you are seeing duplicate data which is making your worksheet too big? 1 Quote Link to comment
michaelk Posted March 28, 2021 Share Posted March 28, 2021 @jmaclights077Â This is a common issue with large databases. Â Like Jesse said, you will need to break it up into several different worksheets. Â There is no page break feature on worksheets. Â I usually break them up into fixture types (channel assignments by 100s) or universe. Â I'll attach an example of each so you can see how it works. Fixture Patch.vwx Quote Link to comment
Pat Stanford Posted March 28, 2021 Share Posted March 28, 2021 Another option is to put the large worksheet on a separate layer and then use cropped viewports to break it up into different segments that can be put next to each other. 2 Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee TomWhiteLight Posted March 28, 2021 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted March 28, 2021 What Pat said is the easiest option. 1 Quote Link to comment
Pat Stanford Posted March 28, 2021 Share Posted March 28, 2021 Thank Tom, but it depends on what you are doing and what you need.  I think it is certainly simpler if you have a one and done situation. If there is a chance that you worksheet will add rows and you care about where the column breaks end up, you end up with a lot of manual work to make ti happen.  Similarly, if you need the headers on each set of columns you would have to do this with separate cropped viewports.  Potentially a lot of manual work.  As I said, if you only have to do it once it is not bad. If you have to manually adjust 6 viewports every time before you print it can get very troublesome  and inconvenient quickly.  But it saves you having to learn about database criteria and from editing multiple worksheets if the columns have to change.  And if you can't find a good set of criteria that will break your columns to reasonable lengths, it is about the only way to proceed.  "You take the good, you take the bad..." 1 Quote Link to comment
Boh Posted March 28, 2021 Share Posted March 28, 2021 On 3/28/2021 at 8:09 AM, Jesse Cogswell said: The major caveat is that you will need to remember to set the Mark field for any fixtures added after making the worksheets. You can avoid this if you can sort your worksheets by criteria that already exists rather than creating a new A,B,C system.  E.g I have 300 doors: 150 are red, 100 are blue, and 50 are green. One worksheet wont fit on a sheet so I create three worksheets, one for each colour. New doors will automatically go on the correct worksheet (as long as they are either green, blue of red) and if one of the doors changes colour then it will automatically switch to the correct worksheet (after recalc).  May work, may not work depending on the application, but if it does this is the best way. 2 Quote Link to comment
Jesse Cogswell Posted March 29, 2021 Share Posted March 29, 2021 @Boh In this instance, I think it depends on how you want the information organized. If you want it sorted by channel number (as he had in his example), you won't be able to use an existing field like Instrument Type unless that's how you've set up the drawing. If I'm doing pipe-end side light, channels 21-23 might be a 36deg, 26deg, and 19deg Source Four (respectively), so building the worksheets using Instrument Type wouldn't work. Unfortunately, Channel is a text-based field, so you also couldn't set your criteria to look at the Channel field value <100 because of how Vectorworks sorts numbers as text. After fiddling around with my plot to build an example, I found that using the Mark column would be the cleanest way to ensure that you could still sort by channel regardless of other field values.  With @jmaclights077's screenshot example, you could divvy up the rows based on Instrument Type, but it might be more awkward to have one worksheet that is 14 rows (as with the VL 3500s) and one that is 89 rows (as with the Robe Spiiders). There also appears to be one fixture type that has more than 100 rows, but it's hard to make out in the screenshot showing the full sheet. I suspect that he is using this as either a patch sheet or as a channel hookup, either of which want to always be sorted by channel.  Ultimately, I think the easiest solution would be to export the data into a .CSV and let Excel deal with the print layout or use a dedicated database software like Lightwright to handle the data. If you absolutely need the data in the VW file, then you could import it in as a referenced PDF. But, as Pat mentioned, then any time you make a change, you have to then export the data to Excel, print to PDF, and either re-import or update the reference, so it still ends up as a decent amount of work. 2 Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee TomWhiteLight Posted March 29, 2021 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted March 29, 2021 We have an enhancement request on this process, Pat's idea is a great solution for now, I have this area for worksheets in my design layers saved in a template file. Quote Link to comment
RickR Posted March 29, 2021 Share Posted March 29, 2021 Years ago I devised a PDF solution. Print the worksheet to PDF and import those pages individually with a referenced link. They will then update every time you update the PDF.  It's cleaner if you make header rows separately as the PDF will only have one set. You can play with the paper size to be more efficient on the final sheet. I imagine the viewport method has the same issue. 1 Quote Link to comment
jmaclights077 Posted March 29, 2021 Author Share Posted March 29, 2021 thanks to everyone Tip´s gentlemen Best from Jmac 🤘😎 Quote Link to comment
Jesse Cogswell Posted December 3, 2021 Share Posted December 3, 2021 I know this is an old thread, but I wrote a workaround to solve this exact problem. It can be found in this post:  It will take an existing worksheet and "split" it into multiple copies while retaining the data, with an option to copy the first row as a header for each split sheet. For non-database rows, the data will even be referenced back to the master sheet, so as long as you remember to recalculate all of your sheets, your split worksheets will always be up to date. There are a couple of specific caveats, though, they're listed in the original post. 1 Quote Link to comment
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