Discover how to create a highly detailed schedule using generic tags in this professional guide. Learn how to add parameters, ensure flexibility with text data types, and sort your information for the most effective organization of data.
Key Insights
- This article demonstrates how to create a detailed schedule using generic tags, which allows you to generate finished specifications for a project.
- Once parameters are set up, users can create a series of parameters, choosing between instance and type parameters. Instance parameters require diligent placement, while type parameters afford greater flexibility.
- The article also provides insights on sorting and grouping data. By sorting by material type, for example, you can organize all flooring, millwork, paint, etc., in a preferred order to enhance productivity and efficiency.
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Now that I have this all set up, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a schedule. So I'm going to go to the view tab, schedules, and then we're looking for note block here. And what it's going to do, it's going to ask us which one of these items here, the family that we're going to use to create our finished specifications.
And for us, it's generic tag. And then I'll take this where it says note block name, and I'm going to call it finished specifications. Okay.
And then it'll want to create the schedule just like we've always done before. And the only parameter that we have that we're going to use on this side here is this data parameter. And so I'll move that one over because the data parameter represents the p 123, and so on.
And then we're going to go ahead and create a series of parameters. And now there's two ways you can do this, you can do it as instance parameters, meaning every time you place one of these p1 tags, the value has to match. That works because you can do it once and then just copy it over and over again.
But it does require you to be diligent about when those get placed. I prefer to use the type parameters, which is why we just went through and made all of those types. And yes, you could do that earlier on in the project and make sure you're placing all those types appropriately.
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That totally works as well. In this case, we're going to go ahead and add the types to the schedule. So I'm going to do new parameter and making sure that says type right here.
And this is going to go for every single one of these that we create. So that needs to be type. The data type needs to be text.
And then we can go in and we can type these in. The reason is we only want to enter this information one time per each of these different categories that we're creating. And the reason we're using text is because we want to have the flexibility to go in and change it to whatever we want it to be.
If we pick one of these other options, then we're going to get stuck with whatever it says that it needs to be, and we won't have the flexibility to change it. And so I want to make sure that we use text because it gives us the most options going forward. So in this case, the next thing we need to do is identify the manufacturer.
Double checking says type, says text, I'm going to hit okay. And I'll do it again. Type, text.
And then this will be our product type, color and finish. And this will be dimensions. And keep in mind, every single time we do this, changing it to text, making sure it stays on type.
And then we'll have notes. And I'll call this install notes. Okay, and then one more here, I'm going to go ahead and add and this is going to help us sort this a little bit better.
I'm going to call that one material type. Okay, so this all looks good, we'll go to sorting and grouping here. And we'll just set this up to sort the way we want.
And so we're going to want this to sort by material type, so that it'll sort, you know, all the flooring, millwork, paint, etc., etc., all down in an order that we want. And then data, so it sorts P one, two, three, in order. Okay, so this looks good.
And I'll hit OK. And it creates a schedule. So you can see here, there's a ton of information on here, because every time the P two instance, or the three instance showed up, it's going to create a data field for us to work with.
And so if you go to sorting and grouping, again, here, you can see it says itemize every instance. If I uncheck that, and hit OK, then it'll bring it down to just the ones that we have once. And so right now, it's just showing B one, CM one, etc., etc., etc.
But as we go through and add our material types, which we identified in our, in our legend here, so paints, flooring, trim, wall finish, millwork, then we can go through and it'll start to sort a little bit better. If I start doing that, so material type, this is wall trim, or we just call this one trim, right, it's going to be applied to all of them. We're going to get that you're going to see that a lot here.
But you can see it added it to many these different ones. And so when you see that occur, then you need to take a look and make sure that when we go back to like our legend here, see this is CM one, and then this is B one. So that got applied to this tag here, when I look at it, we all we now have trim applied to our base and our CM types.
And that's why we're seeing it over and over again, because I go here, edit type, and then I can see that I have material type, right, and I can set it to trim. And so just like when we were looking at the room schedule, this is kind of the same thing, I can go in with my paints, and I can go into where it says paint, and then it says material type, I can go in here, and I can type in paint for this one, and it's going to apply it to all the P ones in the project. And then the same thing here, right, we can just go through and add it that way.
And then the flooring, we can do the same thing where we're just adding it the information, because it doesn't really matter where it gets added within the project, it's all the same database. And so whether I do it within the my finished specifications legend, or if I do it within the schedule, it's all going to get applied the same way. And so the ones where it doesn't seem quite right here are these guys, which I'll need to take a look at and see what's going on there.
But when we look back at that drafting view, we can kind of start to see if these things aren't applied correctly, then that's where you're going to run into those issues. And those all look good. So I'll need to take a look at some of these other ones.
And I have a feeling it's because I applied it to I applied the trim to one of the instances that is part of that generic family. And so once we get these all filled out, which I'll do from the finished legend, then we'll be in good shape. And so these were all flooring here, I'm just going to double check, make sure those are all applied.
And so those are all set, these ones are set, the wall finish, I'm actually going to call this one wall tile, and then our millwork, which in our case is our casework. Okay, and if we look at our schedule, again, you can see it's all sorted. And some of these didn't, they ended up showing up twice here.
And that's if we go to our one of our elevations, let's say this one has, so p3 is on our floor plan. Here. And so when I look at where it says edit type here, that's set to trim.
So I'm going to go ahead and delete that and hit OK, which will change the type because I don't want this one to be tagged that way. And there's one more thing we need to do to sort this out a little bit better. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to fields again.
And what I want to do is because we use the generic one in plan, we actually don't want that one to show up in this schedule. And so the easiest way to do that is if we go to fields, we can add the type and this will be a, this will just be a hidden category or field that we don't want. But we need to have it so that we can see it here.
Right, you can see these are the types that we created. But then we've got a few that are duplicates that we don't want to use. And so if I were to go in and say filter, I could go ahead and filter by type.
And I can say does not equal generic tag. And then the ones that are generic tag here will go away. If I hit OK, then we're back down to just the items that we're, we're trying to add right now.
And you can see because I changed that one to paint, and it's a type parameter, it's going to give us that warning. And everything seems to look good because what we did is remember, we sorted by and filtered by. And so we have these tags.
And then we have this sorted the way we want. And the next thing we'll do before we enter in a whole bunch of data here is do that last little bit of organization. If I go to sorting and grouping, since we sorted by material type, which is this one, I can go ahead and give that a header.
And I don't necessarily need to see either one of these again. And so what I'll do is I'll go into appearance. And I'm sorry, go into formatting.
And then if I go to type here, you can see there's an option for it to be a hidden field. If I check that box will be hidden. And if I go to material type and do the same thing, it'll be hidden.
And when I hit OK, what we'll see is just the schedule with our flooring types, millwork, paint, trim, and our wall tile, all set up in the way we're looking for. And then we can do the last thing here, which was to set that view template to be the schedule typical. So it looks the same as the other one.
And when I do this, just pay attention to the font and then the way this is kind of sorted. And we'll hit OK, and it changed quite dramatically. And now we can pop in and start adding in the data to fill out this schedule.
