A look at how Axiom helps keep your projects on track and on time
CLEARWATER, FLORIDA, USA — Through my trade show travels and market research surveys, I’ve learned about the challenges CAD managers, project managers and administrators face on a daily basis. Quite a few of you have told me about the mental acrobatics you play balancing engineering, drafting and managerial duties. Some of you have told me about the uphill battles that you sometimes have to fight against upper management and the frustrations involved. Still, some of you have told me about the trials you go through in meeting deadlines.
When deadlines are in danger of not being met, CAD managers can look to MicroStation Productivity Toolkit for help.
I want to tell you how three key Axiom tools can and will make your job easier by increasing the productivity of your MicroStation shop and by giving you peace of mind about your MicroStation projects staying on schedule. How do our tools do that? Read on to find out.
FileFixer – Fix any MicroStation file automatically!
FileFixer is the CAD manager’s tool for preventing and fixing MicroStation file corruption across your entire site. With a few mouse clicks, FileFixer can solve problems like end-of-file missing errors, unselectable elements, elements that mysteriously disappear and much more on hundreds of MicroStation files at a time. You can keep informed about the integrity of your MicroStation files by having FileFixer output reports listing the kind of corruption lurking in them and how serious the corruption is. By running FileFixer at regular intervals, you keep file corruption at bay, ensuring your project remains on schedule.
With FileFixer, CAD managers can easily ensure that design files are healthy and whole
Microsoft Office Importer — Import huge quantities of spreadsheet data into MicroStation with exceptional formatting!
The problem of repeatedly pasting enormous amounts of spreadsheet data into MicroStation with less than adequate formatting is a thing of the past. Microsoft Office Importer can paste huge amounts of spreadsheet data with one mouse click. In addition, your drafters can opt to create links between the spreadsheet data and the MicroStation file at the time of import. Text information in the source spreadsheet file is pasted as easy-to-edit, multi-character text elements, not as single-character text elements like MicroStation pastes. By multi-character text elements I mean text elements that are composed of whole words or whole numerical values as opposed to single-character text elements that are composed of only one letter, one number or one symbol each. Microsoft Office Importer also does an excellent job of maintaining the formatting of the spreadsheet data (bolding, italics, underlines, cell borders, alignment, etc.). You’ll never be taken off your more important duties to tend to boring, and often time-consuming, import problems.
Before pasting data into MicroStation, Microsoft Office Importer allows the user to control the text size, the link to the source document and more.
SpecChecker — Perform quality assurance checks on your MicroStation files quickly and easily!
Using SpecChecker, you can be certain that your projects’ design files and cell libraries will adhere to your company’s or client’s CAD standards. SpecChecker finds, reports and automatically corrects CAD standard violations based on level, color, weight, style, text height, text width, font, working units and much more in one or hundreds of MicroStation files at a time. Using SpecChecker, you can minimize the incidence of your deliverables being rejected by the client due to files not conforming to their standards, because SpecChecker will have spotted and corrected the errors before the drawings would have made it out the door. This means a lot less time spent by you or your drafters correcting work that should have been done right the first time around. SpecChecker does in seconds what it would take you days to do — how is that for increasing productivity?
SpecChecker generates a detailed report enumerating all the CAD standard violations found in the processed design files.
MicroStation Productivity Toolkit
MicroStation Productivity Toolkit is our suite of productivity-boosting tools. I am including it in this article, because it carries an exceptional value. If you’re the type of CAD manager that is constantly looking for MicroStation tools that will contribute to the getting more work done in less time and at an exceptional value, MicroStation Productivity Toolkit is for you. Its V7 version offers nineteen of our most popular tools, and its V8 version offers twelve — both at a cost comparable to just three of its component tools.
