Discover how to manage and format large amounts of data in a project schedule, with a focus on group sorting and cost calculation. This guide shares techniques to streamline data, allowing for easier interpretation and more accurate cost projections.
Key Insights
- The article provides instructions on how to manage and simplify large amounts of data in a project schedule. This is achieved by unchecking the 'itemize every instance' feature, which condenses each unique type in the schedule and provides a count and cost for each.
- The guide emphasises the importance of calculating total costs for each item, which can provide a clear understanding of total expenditures. It also explains how to calculate totals within categories, giving a more detailed breakdown of costs.
- Additional instructions are provided on how to format the data for easier interpretation, including making adjustments to column alignment, justifying text to the right, and inserting a unit symbol for cost entries.
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So looking at this schedule, it is nice that we have all of this information, but sometimes that's just too much information. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to that Sorting/Grouping tab. And what I could do is I can actually tell it to not itemize every instance, which is what it's doing right now by showing every single instance of every single family that's loaded into this project that meet the parameters of this schedule.
If I say uncheck that itemize every instance and click OK, I want you to pay attention to the count and the cost columns because those are going to change dramatically here. When I click OK, what's great about this is it will condense each one of our unique types here. And then it will give us the count and the cost as well is still staying as is.
We get more of a unit cost within there. And it's pretty neat to have that because now we have the ability to see how much each one of these things cost and also a pretty clear idea of the quantity of each one. Now, if you wanted to see what the total cost was, we can actually tell it to calculate the totals, which would give us our unit cost.
Times the count, and I can do that from the Formatting tab. If I were to go to Formatting and click on cost, you can see here that no calculation is taking place. But if I were to tell it to calculate totals, then it will give me a total cost for all this information.
So I can click OK, and now I can see that the total cost is populated in here. So something like C1, that was $500 a piece. Well, we have 12 of those, so it's going to be $6,000.
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So most of this is not very helpful unless we were to calculate each of these totals. So let's say I wanted to know how much I'm spending on furniture, furniture systems, and plumbing fixtures independently. Well, I could do that as well.
If I go to Sorting/Grouping, I can actually give it a footer by Category, and it'll give me the title, count, and the totals for each one. Or I can just say title and totals, or just give it the totals only. In this case, we're going to have a lot of information, so I'm going to say blank line here, and I'll leave that one at totals only.
And then if I wanted a grand total of all of the categories together, I could say grand totals, and I'll change that to just title and totals. One last thing I want to do in here before we get out of that is similar to our door schedule, Category is already taken care of. So it's not something we need to leave in the schedule as a visible column.
If I were to go to my Formatting tab, I can click on Category and make it a hidden field. And then we can give it the same appearance because we want all our schedules to look the same. So I'll go to Appearance, give it a wide outline, and then I can go in and adjust my multi-category schedule title to have the same font, which we did 3/16" for the height, and then made it bold, and I'll click OK.
And so now I've got the same setup here. One thing I will do is I'll stretch this out a bit to avoid having a second line there, because some of these are pretty long. And now this schedule is ready to be put on our sheet.
So I can go over to the sheet. Now that we've got all of our totals adding up here. So I'll find my sheet here.
And then same thing as before, I'll move the multi-category schedule across. And then I can spread this out to give it a little bit more space to make it easier to read. So I'll stretch these across here.
And I'd like to have it so it's only all on one line again, because it's just easier to read that way. And it's also nice if I have them kind of formatted in a similar way. So having the cost columns a little bit scrunched there, so I can move these around.
And it's not an exact science, obviously, because I'm not snapping to anything, but I am just making some adjustments. One thing that some of you may have noticed is we are totaling these numbers here. But we are also justifying it to the left, which is not very common.
If I wanted to modify this schedule, I could right-click on the schedule. And I can go to Edit Schedule. And it'll just take me back to this tab.
And then I can format the cost column to show differently. So I can go to my Formatting, cost, and I can do a few things. I can adjust the alignment.
So instead of left, I can change it to right. And it'll take care of it that way for me. And you can even adjust the Units Format to have it look a little bit differently.
If it's set to currency, which is the project settings, I can actually go in and I can give it a unit symbol, which in our case would be the dollar sign. And I can click OK. Everything should justify to the right now and click OK again.
And now it actually shows dollar signs with the proper justification. And go back to our sheet and double check to make sure I got the formatting correct. I got the bold line, bold text.
Looks good. And now we're ready to take a look at our next schedule, which is going to be a room schedule that we're going to use to estimate the cost of flooring that we have in the project.
