Archive for November, 2006

Editor’s Forum: Is there an approaching shortage of CAD users?

Tuesday, 7 November 2006

According to a 2002 article published in the Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice by Moncef Nehdi, P.E., “the brightest students entering post-secondary education are often attracted by routes other than engineering that are perceived more likely to yield careers of higher prestige and greater returns. For civil engineering in particular, this is further compounded by the fact that the field is not traditionally viewed as a high-tech discipline. Thus, student quality, enrollment, and research funding in civil engineering programs have been declining across North America. The conservative construction industry is part of the problem; adjustments of this aging cartel to the new economy are still at the embryonic level. Civil engineering educators are facing the question, ‘How do we change the hardhat-down-in-the-ditch image of civil engineering in the minds of the new information technology generation?’”

In a recent survey, we found out that 55.3% of MicroStation users were age 41–50 and only 12.4% were age 21–30. Also, at this year’s BE Conference, Bentley made a passionate push for the BE Careers Network, which focuses on increasing the number of students entering the AEC field.

Could the CAD industry be faced with a shortage of experienced CAD users over the next ten to twenty years?

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CAD Coordinator — of famous historical heritage — organizes 1,000 cells in four hours with CellManager.

Tuesday, 7 November 2006

ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA — Sometimes you need a little help from your friends. When CAD Coordinator Charles Pinckney of Perry, Crabb & Associates had the daunting task of organizing 1,000 cells, his friend in the IT department gave him a gentle shove in the direction of CellManager.

Charles found that he saved immense amounts of time by using CellManager to condense and organize his cell libraries. Charles shared his success using CellManager with us and we thought you might enjoy it as well.

MicroStation Today: Tell us about yourself.
Charles: I work for a great company called Perry, Crabb & Associates
(PCA) in Atlanta, Georgia. PCA is a consulting engineering firm for mechanical, electrical and plumbing design. Our clients are mainly hospitals in Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama. I am a CAD Coordinator at PCA, but I am also an electrical designer.

MST: What are some of the problems you encounter in your position?
Charles: Recently, I had to condense and update our cell libraries. I wondered how I was going to update all thirteen libraries with MicroStation V8 tools. Our IT guy Chip Atkins, who also is an electrical engineer by trade, had told me that CellManager for V8 would be the perfect solution to my dilemma. By using CellManager’s Draw Pages command I was able to print out a report of every cell with its attributes. I found out that I had a lot of repeated and outdated cells throughout the original thirteen libraries. With CellManager for V8, I was able to remove and place the old cells that were not being used into an archival library with great ease. I got rid of about one third — or somewhere around 300 — of the obsolete cells that were duplicates or outdated and organized the remaining 1,000 electrical cells into 11 libraries. What would have taken me eight hours only took me half that amount of time and was much easier than expected. I was able to edit far better with CellManager for V8 than the editing tools from MicroStation V8.

MST: What other products do you find beneficial?
Charles: RefManager is another useful application in MicroStation Productivity Toolkit. For example, we had a 200-sheet job with multiple keyplans [Editors note: keyplans are small icons on the side of the plot that show what part of the design file is being viewed.] and multiple sections. So, we had a total of six floors with 14 sections and what would have taken six hours one sheet at a time, only took about one hour. Now that is a money saver.

MST: If you could trade places with anyone for just one day, who would it be?
Charles: Bill Gates.

MST: Are you related to Charles Cotesworth-Pinckney, the South Carolina state representative that signed the Constitution of the United States of America?
Charles: Yes, it’s funny you ask. I’ve often said that that is my 15 minutes of fame.

MST: Until now anyway. Any words of wisdom you would like to share?
Charles: Favorite quote which I saw on a church marquee: “If you do what you’ve always done, you will always be where you’ve always been.”

MST: Thank you so much, Charles!
Charles: Thank you, MicroStation Today!

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How to survive the constant demands for change in the MicroStation world.

Tuesday, 7 November 2006

CLEARWATER, FLORIDA, USA — Day after day, MicroStation managers and users ask us for solutions to the latest time-consuming problems that have been tossed their way. Most of the time, these problems are due to orders to bring about consistency in the CAD environment or a client’s last-minute demands.

Axiom’s MicroStation Productivity Toolkit comprises a package of MicroStation utilities that gives you the power to handle these constant demands for change, gracefully and quickly. While every shop doesn’t necessarily have a major problem daily, there are numerous situations that occur regularly in any CAD environment, where having a tool designed to make the types of changes you need on multiple design files could save you or your users many hours of painful, manual work. Let’s take a look at some typical examples and see how MicroStation Productivity Toolkit can take some of the sting out of change!

Use Global File Changer to select the command file and select the design files to run the command file on.

Changing design file settings on the fly!
You’ve got a project nearing completion and need to make a submittal to your customer. Because the fifty files in the project are being changed daily, with MicroStation alone there is no telling what condition the level display and view attributes were left in by the last user without opening up each file. Then you have to make the needed adjustments and save the settings. If you had Global File Changer (a component of MicroStation Productivity Toolkit), you could set up a simple command file that would turn on the views you wanted; turn off the ones you didn’t want; set the level displays for each view according to the standard; adjust the necessary display settings; fit the views you wanted; and save the settings. This series of steps could then be run on all fifty design files automatically one after the other in just a few minutes. The command file you created could be saved and reused every time design files needed to be sent to that customer. If you have multiple customers, the same command file can be copied with an appropriate name and adjusted to match each client’s submittal demands.

FileFixer’s <Repair> function and the report file that tells you everything that was fixed

Change the hand that file corruption deals you
We also hear about how “Murphy’s Law” applies to the MicroStation community. Take the following as an example. A large project is due tomorrow. MicroStation displays an error dialog when you attempt to open the file. The last backup was done last week. Without FileFixer, another MicroStation Productivity Toolkit component, effectively repairing this file fast enough to meet the deadline could be impossible. With FileFixer, a complete repair usually takes less than five minutes — start to finish — and you’re back in business.

RefManager gives you exactly precise control over which reference file attachments you want to change and which ones you don’t want to change.

Changing reference file settings to meet a standard
Has this one ever happened to you? Your customer insists that reference file full paths must not be saved. In addition, they demand that logical names of the border reference files be “Border C”, “Border D”, and so on. Instead, your designer inadvertently saved the full path and used “C Sheet”, “D Sheet”, and so on, as the logical names. For a project of forty sheet files, with four to ten reference files each, it could easily take hours to correct the settings in all the sheet files. With RefManager, yet another component of MicroStation Productivity Toolkit, you could remove any saved full path and change the appropriate logical names in a single automated pass that wouldn’t take more than ten minutes.

MicroStation Productivity Toolkit has the right tools!
For 21 years, Axiom has been working with CAD professionals to build and enhance the tools in MicroStation Productivity Toolkit to provide effective solutions for the thousands of different problems that can come up in any MicroStation shop. MicroStation Productivity Toolkit includes programs that make short work of reference file problems, cell library management, design file corruption repair, quality assurance checks, bulk file manipulation, annoying duplicate element removal, import of large Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, design file comparisons and much, much more.

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CellManager for V8 is in the import business.

Tuesday, 7 November 2006

CLEARWATER, FLORIDA, USA — CellManager has been one of the most demanded applications in Axiom’s MicroStation Productivity Toolkit for more than a decade. The latest release of CellManager for V8 includes some new features that were added to satisfy customer requests.

The new CellManager for V8 release allows you to import DGNs, DWGs and other CAD file types into your cell libraries in bulk.

CellManager for V8 can now automatically import and create new cells from AutoCAD blocks and MicroStation V7 or V8 design files — and even files created by AutoDesk’s 3D Studio.

CellManager for V8 can import one file at a time or multiple files all at once (in bulk). While MicroStation’s “Model Manager” creates empty cells out of empty paper space (the AutoCAD counterpart to Micro Station sheet models), CellManager for V8′s Import command knows not to import empty paper space, ultimately saving users time. Unlike the layout1, layout2, or model-1, model-2 names that Microstation uses to name cells, CellManager for V8 uses the imported file’s name as the cell name, saving additional time. Therefore, CellManager for V8 automatically handles the inconvenience of renaming cells and deleting empty cells.

These new import capabilities preserve the value of your existing assets — no need to invest time recreating cells that already exist! CellManager for V8 makes it easy to bring your directories full of AutoCAD blocks or standard V7 detail drawings (standard drawings with dimensions or other information for use in construction) with you as you migrate to V8. Put them to use immediately — don’t let them get lost or forgotten.

Once your cells have been imported into a consolidated, central project cell library, you can use CellManager for V8 to standardize and update your cells. CellManager for V8 now has the ability to rename cells and cell descriptions. The new Rename feature along with CellManager for V8′s multitude of other options will save you precious time.

CellManager for V8 has always had a complete set of cell documentation features. These features allow complete control of the cell document format. You can print cell documentation that shows a picture of the cells along with vital cell information. CellManager for V8′s Report and Draw Pages commands support the optional display of over 30 cell attributes, including cell level, name, description and many more. Use CellManager for V8 settings to customize output, page or plot settings. Custom layouts let you make your cell library documentation look exactly the way you want. You can even include your company logo. Current and complete cell documentation will help keep you working and not hunting for or, worse yet, redrawing cells that have already been created.

CellManager for V8 can bulk import many types of CAD files into a V8 cell library.

Other features, such as Extract, help you create new cell libraries from the cells and shared cells in your existing design files, and Export will move or copy cells or shared cells between libraries. CellManager for V8′s Modify command can help you quickly modify cell levels and symbology to meet project standards. If you need to quickly modify, transform, convert, export, import, delete, edit, rename, extract or document your cells, Axiom’s CellManager for V8 is a full-featured application that will make you more productive than using Microstation alone.

With the addition of Axiom’s File List Processor, CellManager for V8 boasts an improved file selection interface, which is easier to use and which even allows you to drag and drop files from Windows Explorer. Also, the file selection process is dramatically faster. The latest version, CellManager for V8 version 8.4a has been certified to work with MicroStation XM.

CellManager for V8, one of the most demanded applications in Axiom’s MicroStation Productivity Toolkit, boasts a new release that includes significant new features which will definitely benefit existing as well as potential customers.

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