Archive for May, 2009

Microsoft Office Importer adds ProjectWise support.

Friday, 15 May 2009

By Eiren Smith
What do MicroStation users do if they want to easily import large spreadsheets and word processing data into their design files with perfect formatting? What if they want to maintain a link to the original spreadsheet so that if something changes in the spreadsheet, the design file can be easily — interactively or automatically — updated? What if they use ProjectWise?

Microsoft Office Importer — which now talks to ProjectWise — lets you import word processing and spreadsheet data into your design files with formatting you control.

I’m a little tight on space this month so I’ll keep it brief. I want to tell you about Microsoft Office Importer’s brand-new and most excellent support for Bentley ProjectWise.

You all know what Microsoft Office Importer is, right? It’s Axiom’s super-popular tool for bringing data from Excel spreadsheets and Word documents into MicroStation with perfect formatting with a link to the source spreadsheet or document. Users open the spreadsheet or document, copy what they want to the clipboard, then jump over to MicroStation and paste that data, using the “Paste Clipboard Contents” button on Microsoft Office Importer’s toolbar. In addition to bringing the data in with perfect formatting, it provides tons of options so you can have things formatted exactly the way you want. Microsoft Office Importer also provides a link from that design file back to the spreadsheet or document so that pasted data in the design file can be easily (interactively or automatically) updated anytime in the future if the source spreadsheet or document file changes.

Enter ProjectWise
Microsoft Office Importer has long made all the above extremely easy to do, but (until now) wasn’t able to communicate with ProjectWise. So when Microsoft Office Importer would go to see if the spreadsheet or document had changed, that spreadsheet or document had to be in the exact same location it was when it was originally pasted into that design file. This meant two things:

  • The user had to check that spreadsheet or document out of ProjectWise before Microsoft Office Importer could check to see if the design file needed to be updated from that spreadsheet or document; and
  • The user had to check the spreadsheet or document out to exactly the same folder as it was checked out to the first time it was pasted into that design file, as that’s where Microsoft Office Importer was going to look for it at update time.

All this was because Microsoft Office Importer simply didn’t talk to ProjectWise. I’m happy to report that that’s now totally handled. Now, when Microsoft Office Importer needs to see if the design file needs to be updated, Microsoft Office Importer can talk to ProjectWise and check out any needed files automatically. This means that Microsoft Office Importer updates of spreadsheet and document data in design files are now totally workable for ProjectWise users.

As I mentioned above, I’m tight on space this month. Check back in the future for a detailed description of how this all works. But don’t let that keep you from trying out the new version of Microsoft Office Importer with ProjectWise support for yourself. It’s so easy to use, you really don’t need to know anything that non-ProjectWise Microsoft Office Importer users don’t know. Take it for a spin!

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Save time and prevent a CAD standards nightmare.

Friday, 15 May 2009

Part two in a series of articles on the mysteries of global origin

By Rick Dewitt

Have you ever started a project and noticed that one or more reference files didn’t seem to line up in your master files the way you expected or that the geometry you expected to be a particular size was too big or too small? In a previous issue of MicroStation Today, I wrote the first segment of an in-depth discussion on the frequently misunderstood subject of “global origins”. [Editor's note: See MicroStation Today Volume 16, Issue 3. The article can be found here] Not understanding global origin and a closely related topic, “working resolution”, can lead to a host of questions such as:

Not knowing how global origin affects your design files could result in time-consuming and costly mistakes — the kind that keep you up at night.

  • What exactly is the global origin?
  • What happens if you change it?
  • How do you change it?
  • How does it affect reference files?
  • How is working resolution related?
  • Does Axiom have any products that can help fix global origin and working resolution problems?

In this article, I will continue that discussion so you have an even better grasp of the subject, how it can impact your projects and what you can do if you discover the global origin is wrong in some or all your project design files.
If you ever had a time when one or more reference files didn’t line up in your master files the way you expected after attachment or the geometry appeared way too big or way too small, then you had mismatched global origin settings, working unit settings, working resolution settings or some combination of all three.

The global origin is a setting made relative to the MicroStation design plane (for 2D) or cube (for 3D) which defines where the x=0, y=0 and z=0 coordinate point is located. The global origin point, when you ask MicroStation, is defined (set) as a certain number of master units (like feet or meters) from a predefined fixed point on the design plane (or cube) along each axis. The “predefined fixed point” is set by Bentley (more on this below).
“Master units”, as you probably know, define what we will call the real world distance measurement in a design file.

For civil engineering projects, this is usually feet or meters. If you are designing circuit boards however, you would probably prefer inches or millimeters as a master unit.

“Working resolution” defines how many units of resolution are going to be used to make up a specific unit of measure like a foot or a meter. For example, if you set the units of resolution to 1,000 units per foot in a design file, then a line that is one foot long will take up ten times more design plane than a one-foot line in a design file whose units of resolution are set to 100 units per foot. So, if you attach a reference file that uses 1,000 units of resolution per foot to a master file that uses 100 units of resolution per foot, at a scale of 1.0, then a one-foot line in the reference file will look like a ten-foot line in the master file.

Because the global origin is expressed as a value in master units like feet or meters, the same point on the design plane can have a very different value when the master units of two files are different or the working resolution is different for the same distance of measure.

Combining V7 and V8 files can create unexpected problems.
In MicroStation V8, the predefined fixed point used to help locate the global origin was changed from where this point was in V7. Specifically, the predefined fixed point was moved from the lower, left-hand corner (for 2D designs) to the exact center of the design plane. What’s more, the design plane is significantly larger (about 2 million times larger) in V8 than it was in V7. For 3D designs, the predefined fixed point was moved from the lower, bottom-left corner (where it was in V7) to the precise middle of the design cube (in V8). This change has created some confusions and problems — particularly when combining MicroStation V7 design files with MicroStation V8 design files in the same project.

One example of such problems occurs with “coincident” reference file attachments. When you make a coincident reference file attachment, MicroStation orients the two design files so the design planes match up exactly. It’s important to know that the thing MicroStation matches up is the design planes, not the global origins. In projects where all the design files (including all the reference files) use the same global origin and the same working resolution, then obviously all the global origins and geometry will happen to line up as well. Unfortunately, this is not the case if the global origin or working resolution settings of a master file are different from those of an attached reference file. In this case, the geometry in the reference files will not line up as expected due to global origin differences or the size of the elements will be wrong due to differences in working resolution.

When the global origins are different between master and reference files, a coincident attachment will offset geometry just like the global origins are offset above.

For instance, let’s say that you have a hybrid project that includes V7 design files, V8 design files and maybe even AutoCAD files. If each type (V7 or V8) of MicroStation file uses a different global origin setting and the working resolution settings are different, you are going to notice reference file geometry not having the expected orientation to the master file’s coordinate system. Also, the size of the geometry from the reference file will appear wrong.

Similar to the above, if the V7 or AutoCAD files are being translated into V8 format or vice-versa, you can easily run into the same problems if the translators are not set up to handle these factors properly. Understanding global origin and working resolution and how to fix them is crucial when you are responsible for creating projects that must comply to CAD standards or if you have to define the CAD standards others must follow.

Avoiding a time-consuming nightmare
Let’s say you translate a group of files from AutoCAD to MicroStation V8 without ensuring that the translated files come into MicroStation with the required working units (such as feet or meters), resolution settings and global origin settings. Guess what? You are playing Russian roulette with your company’s potential profit on that project. It’s true you might get lucky using the default translation settings or you might have a client who isn’t picky about settings as long as the sheets plot correctly. But if you aren’t lucky and the project has to be fixed to comply with a different resolution standard and a different global origin value, you will have a time-consuming nightmare on your hands. Why? Because changing the resolution changes the “real-world” size and location of every element already in the design file and changing the global origin changes the coordinate location of every element. To get things right after designing the project, you will have to re-scale and move everything. Re-scaling and moving elements obviously affects where reference file elements are going to display in master files. If reference file attachments are clipped, the elements in the reference files, after being rescaled and moved, will almost certainly disappear outside the clipping boundary, making it necessary to fix that as well. I could go on but I’m sure you get the point.

Some solutions may not meet your CAD standards.
In MicroStation V8, Bentley added a new attachment method called “Coincident World” to help make this all a little easier for users to deal with. “Coincident World” matches the attachment’s global origin to the master file’s global origin. This is really useful when files from multiple projects — that may have different global origin settings — are used together. Using this attachment method along with the “True Scale” option (which automatically scales the attachment to compensate for differences in working units or resolution) can make combining files from different projects very simple in V8 — provided you don’t have CAD standards that forbid having different global origin settings or different working resolution settings. Unfortunately for many, a number of CAD standards still require the use of very specific global origin and working resolution settings. When those settings aren’t followed, the time-consuming nightmare mentioned above comes into play.

Because of these problems, Axiom added additional features to Global File Changer that help isolate design files with non-standard settings and provide a way to easily update those design file settings to match the standard. Global File Changer and other tools from the MicroStation Productivity Toolkit provide effective solutions that can drastically reduce the time required to fix project design files, including those created using non-standard working resolution or global origins settings.

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Tips & Tricks — How to quickly find any text string (or just about anything else) in all the design files at your entire site

Friday, 15 May 2009

By Rick Sewell

Have you ever had a need to determine which of your massive set of DGN project files contained a specific text string or a particular cell or model or level? How do you handle those situations now? How much time have you lost on projects just trying to locate things? How much money do you lose on time-consuming searches?

Now you can instantly and easily locate almost any design file component in any DGN file at your entire site — and that’s just the beginning.

I routinely field calls from MicroStation users and CAD managers who are looking for ways to find a specific graphical element which they know is located somewhere in one or more of their hundreds (or thousands) of MicroStation files. Now that CadExplore Browser™ has been released, I can’t wait to tell you what can be accomplished with this powerful new technology.

Example: How to find every instance of a specific text string in all your design files (and how to modify it)
 There are any number of examples I can use, but I’ve chosen this one because it represents a real-world customer request that I believe will be useful for most MicroStation users.

  1. Load CadExplore Browser.
  2. Click on the “Elements” tab.

    Figure 1. In CadExplore Browser, every column has a filter button allowing limitless display possibilities for your CAD data.

  3. Locate the column labeled “Text”.
  4. Hover your mouse over the “Text” column to display the filter icon. Click the filter icon.
  5. Choose “(Filter Editor)”. This will display the “Filter Editor” dialog box.
  6. Click on “Is not blank” and set it to “abc Contains” (shown in Figure 2).
  7. In the “<enter a value>” field, enter the text value that you are looking for. For this example, we will search for the text string “Project X” (Figure 3).
  8. Press <Apply> to activate your filter.
    Each row represents an instance of a given element in a design file. CadExplore Browser’s grid will refresh and display only those rows that match your filter. In this example, each row in Figure 4, represents a single instance of the text string we searched for (“Project X”) along with the name of the DGN file and model where the instance resides.

    Figure 2. With CadExplore Browser, you can choose from many different filtering options to create a filter precise enough to find a needle in a haystack.

    For this simple example, notice that CadExplore Browser found two design files (“Phase1.dgn” and “Phase2.dgn”) that contain instances of the text we searched for. (Six instances were found in “Phase1.dgn” and nine were found in “Phase2.dgn”)
    Next we will use one of my favorite CadExplore Browser features (Grouping) to create a list of the files which contain the text which matches our filter.

    Figure 3. The filter editor lets you instantly find the exact MicroStation elements you are looking for using powerful filters like the “Text Contains” filter shown here.

This results in a list that summarizes which MicroStation files contain the text you are hunting for (in this case, the text string “Project X”). No need to tediously open design files one by one to locate text! You can modify your filter to search for any other text string instantly. You can filter and group any combination of columns — so this is just a taste of the capabilities of CadExplore Browser.

Figure 4. In this example, CadExplore Browser applies the filter you defined (as shown in Figure 3) to display only those text elements which contain “Project X”, along with the name of the file and model in which each text element resides.

Now that you have your list of every design file that contains the text string “Project X”, you can do whatever you want to with it. For example, if you need to modify the selected text string, you could change every instance of it, in batch, simply by exporting the list you just created with CadExplore Browser into Microsoft Excel. By simply saving your Excel spreadsheet as a text file, you can then import it into Global File Changer™. Global File Changer can then make any change you want to every instance of your text string in those files very fast.

Figure 5. The grouping feature allows you to summarize information that is in a particular column such as the “Drive”, “Folder” or “File Name” columns. The example above shows how you would use the grouping feature to summarize the information in the “File Name” column.

There are many other things you can do too, but I’m out of space, so that will have to be the topic of another article.

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