Fabrication: 60 Tips in 60 Minutes (Repeat)

DARREN YOUNG: Let's get going here. Got 60 tips in 60 minutes, so it's going to go quick. We won't have time for questions but we both have got cards available. Contact us anytime after. Just come up after the class, grab our contact information. Happy to go over stuff. Handouts available online, things like that. You know, the usual stuff.

You'll see up there we've got Greg Murphy from Murphy Company out of St. Louis. And I'm Darren Young with Hermanson, Seattle. Jubel was not able to make it. Work calls. Job came up, due the end of the month. Had to get things done.

Enough with the PowerPoint. Let's just get going on our tips here and then we'll get going.

So tip number 1 that I've got is-- it's actually been fixed. And it's not to call out a bug or a particular site CID but in this case, there was a bullhead tee that, when the branch had a an angle of 90 degrees, it would give a dimensional error. I typed in 90.000001 and got rid of the error. The tip here is that you can do tricks like that sometimes to work around those issues.

A couple years ago, when we did one of these sessions, there was a similar CID for a balancing valve. Had a zero length handle and you got a dimensional error because it was zero length. But if you changed it from square to round handle, zero length handle didn't give an error. Like I said, the tip is just try some of those types of things when you run into those goofy issues with some of your patterns from release to release. Sometimes you find a way to work around them issues until they fix the issue.

All right. So another tip here is you can customize the information in the Item tab. And because we don't have our third guy here, takes me longer to get prepared. I'm just going to kind of show the screencasts I have. Greg will probably doing more online. Hopefully this'll load here quick. It wasn't too bad before.

But when you go into the ITM editor-- here, let me start that over, back up. You see that little button down there? That button will allow you to customize what shows up in that Item tab, and then that will be custom for all of your items unless you've overridden one of the-- you can do it on an ITM-by-ITM basis, but this is global and that will change it for all the ITMs. Maybe you want to see notes, maybe you don't. Things like that.

Anyway, that's my tip. I've got too many things open here. Greg, you want to switch over?

GREG MURPHY: No, this one's just going to be a talking point we'll see on the screen here. OK. So this is compliments of David Ronson. He has a blog out and he's actually done some work on this POSITION.DAT. We've covered this before. The POSITION.DAT file stores that view of how you want see the data within that folder for that one particular item grouping of manufacturer data. So that POSITION.DAT exists in every folder within the system. So what you'll see here on the screen here, if you go to that video--

DARREN YOUNG: You want me to call that up?

GREG MURPHY: --he explains it in real good detail on how to use Windows shell. Isn't that what it's called?

DARREN YOUNG: PowerShell.

GREG MURPHY: PowerShell to put the path in. And it'll then take where I want my POSITION.DAT file that I want to copy, it'll copy across every one of your folders all at one time.

DARREN YOUNG: Let me try this.

GREG MURPHY: And then every one of your views, whenever you go to Details and you want to see all the layout, all of it will be the same. Very, very quick and very handy. So you can change out, and you can grab what folder structures you want. So you'll want different ones for sheet metal versus piping and what not.

DARREN YOUNG: So you see he's calling up PowerShell. It's built into Windows. And he's just typing in a script that actually copies that out. A couple years ago when we did this class I did a similar thing with a batch file, and I just leave it in the folders, browse through and run it. A couple different ways. Whatever you're comfortable with.

Anyway, that's compliments of David Ronson at Applied Software.

All right. Tip number 4. Anybody use Apache OpenOffice? I use it in addition to Excel. The reason I do it is I export a lot of bulk product list information and ITMs, piping specifically. And then I'm editing those fractions Excel will sometimes turn into a date.

Let me speed this up along here. So here you've got to go-- and it's delimited. Like I say, it's comma delimited. You got to change all the columns to text so it doesn't convert things like fractions into dates and screw up my Harrison codes or whatever I've got else in there. So I may open up six of these all at one time and just select a bunch of files. I've got to do this every time. Anyone has another way to do that, let me know.

So instead of doing that, you can download this for free. It's open source. But Apache has a program called Calc, which is their Excel equivalent. And so we'll run through this. You see I'm going to filter it back down now to the text files for my product list information. I'm going to select a number of them. And when it pops up here, the same thing. Like I say, it's comma delimited. I set all my settings, but now it remembers those and I just keep clicking OK.

When I've got hundreds of ITMs to fix product list information on or change it, adding some database IDs, this makes it a lot quicker for me to open them up. Nice little tip there, I thought, anyway.

Here's another one. We talked about customizing the information that shows up in the Item tab across all your ITMs. Their internet's not too bad here. You can actually do it on an ITM-by-ITM basis, but you have to do it from the Folders view. And now you can customize the information that shows up for a particular ITM. Maybe you've got some damper blades or something simple and you don't want all that information in the ITM tab. You can copy that over or you can have that customized on a per-ITM basis.

GREG MURPHY: Right. Just be careful, though, because if you're copying that ITM to make another ITM, you want to make sure you check-- if you're doing that on your items individually, make sure you check that before you copy it because now you might not get the reporting that you want.

DARREN YOUNG: Exactly. That's something I see all the time. People don't think to look at that, and unfortunately I've not found a way to script that off. You're really going back in and taking it off.

GREG MURPHY: All right. Tip number 6. So, how many of you out there build content?

DARREN YOUNG: You want me to switch over?

GREG MURPHY: A number of guys that I know do. I build my own content. So whenever you're going through and having to do testing--

DARREN YOUNG: You want me to switch over?

GREG MURPHY: That would be fantastic. Why don't you switch over? All right. So I'm going to demonstrate a way to pull that data up and do testing. Rather than clicking on a button and having to go through every size and go, OK, I want to pull one in, pull one in, pull one in, what we can do is, this only works on product listed data, so if I go to my Details view, I'm looking over here. Again, this is that POSITION.DAT we talked about earlier, right? So this is the way I lay it out. So we have customized--

DARREN YOUNG: Did we lose you? Yeah, we lost the video. Plug back out, back in. Season seven. Yep. Yep. Blinking. Yes.

GREG MURPHY: All right. So I'll go back to my other view. So I was in my--

DARREN YOUNG: The bottom button?

GREG MURPHY: --large icon view. So I just go in and find the parts that I let's say I just built and now I want to test them and see how they work. So these are some of my high purity fittings. I'm going to go in and view my details. Again, this being my POSITION.DAT file that sets up the organization of how I want to see my layout.

Then I have to look in here and find what has been cataloged because I cannot do this function on anything that's not cataloged. OK? So I'm going to go through and select everything, just scroll through here and see if I have anything that's not cataloged, and everything is in this case.

So hold down the Shift Control key at same time. You have to hold it down over top of the selected blue, then right-click. Then you'll get this Take Off All Product Sizes. This only shows up in the estimating program, by the way. And CAM.

So if I hit that button right there, it'll go through every one of those and take off every size of every item within those products. OK?

So it just finished. Now I'll come over to my Items screen to see all the items. So there's all my items. And now I'm going through here and checking to see if I've got-- is material all there, is my labor all there, is my description all there, and I can verify that my integrity is there for these components.

DARREN YOUNG: Occasionally, release to release, you'll get a bug in an ITM pattern that now throws a dimensional error that it didn't before. Good way to verify that. You'll see it there if that happens.

All right. So my tip. You guys have all seen sometimes when you sort alphabetically, you get 1, 11, 12, 2, 20, things like that. Sometimes I've seen product lists where they're listed, I've got one inch, inch and a half, inch and a quarter. And I want to fix that. Again, when I export out my product list information from an ITM, I can actually go through and sort that. But instead of sorting it by the product information or manually shifting things around, you can actually sort-- I'm going to speed this up a little bit-- based on the dimensional columns.

So I'm going to go through here. You're going to see you've got a dimension for each of those. Like this is a reducing tee. I can sort by dimension one, dimension two, by dimension three. And now that'll reorder my product list to maybe the order I want it. But that's my little tip. Like I said, I'm pretty particular about the order of those things and it's a quick way to reorder those. Don't sort on the name. Sort on the dimensions to get it in the order you want.

GREG MURPHY: On the other side of that, I'll add is sometimes I've done that with stub-ins or [INAUDIBLE]. Sometimes you might want to have everything of two inch that you're connecting to all in one range, and you can do the same thing and then reorganize that.

They can hear me anyway, right? You guys have been able to hear me? All right, good.

DARREN YOUNG: All right. So another other tip here is, we've done this class two other years. Last year they didn't pick it up but the two prior years we did. Got links to those sessions there. So it says 60 Tips in 60 Minutes. This gives you an extra 120. Go back and review them. There might be some things you forget. There always is. But it's a nice refresher.

GREG MURPHY: Yep. It's always hard to come up with another individual 60 without adding to them. All right. So tip number 9 is when you're editing and building service templates, OK? So this may be one that I'm hoping some of you may have not seen before. When we're going in and editing a service-- you are on my screen, right?

DARREN YOUNG: Yes.

GREG MURPHY: So we can copy from another template, right? So we all know we can go in here and find another template and drag another item in if we want. However, we can only do that one at a time. I can't take this tab, right, and drag that tab over. So if I go back to my item folder, then I'm dragging in individual ones, right? However, we can drag an entire folder in here, I believe. OK? Which you might want to do if you're trying to build a tab specific to a material, so that works out. And you need to go delete the buttons you don't want. All right?

But this particular tip is about grabbing from another template that you've already built. Now I can grab a tab. So let's say on my medium pressure I had a different set of hangers. OK, obviously it's not the best example. But I want to copy this tab right here. Switch back to the service I was just in, if I can switch to that service. I can now copy and paste that right in there. Now I have an entire tab that I built in another service.

So think about that. When you're building your services, build services for that manufacturer of a tab of that material. Store those in service templates. Now you can go back and just copy them into your new ones really easily.

DARREN YOUNG: A lot of people don't know that tip. They're focused on that left side of the screen, trying to copy and paste from there. It doesn't work. You can do it from the right side of the screen.

All right. So my tip is there's another little tool I use called Notepad++. Again, when I'm going through and bulk editing some TXT files, the exports from the product list information, I am very particular about how I want those product lists named. Do I want inch marks, do I not? What I don't want is some have inch marks, some don't. Some have numbers-X-numbers. Some have numbers-Space-X- by Space-number.

I can use this Notepad++ to quickly standardize that. It has a search and replace functionality that works across multiple files in multiple folders. So you see here I've got some examples in this one where there's just different naming schemes.

I can call up in here and actually search for information. So what I'll typically do, I don't want inch marks. You don't want a double quote. That throws off Excel. You could have two single quotes. I'll search for double quotes and replace it with nothing. I'll search for the two single quotes, replace it with nothing. I'll search for an X and replace it with a Space-X-Space.

But I might have some that already have spaces there. Now I've got double spaces, so I search again. Space-Space-X-Space-Space and replace it. But now I've got my product list names standardized and then I can import those back into my ITM.

Let's see here. The next one, I believe this was a wish list request from Scott Hendricks on the Idea Station. I never knew this before and it's kind of minor, but again, you might want to preferences, but you can switch between horizontal and vertical layouts of your item folders. Before, you didn't used to be able to do that. I thought Autodesk just switched it. I didn't know that you could toggle back and forth between it.

RIF, I believe. Your screen's up.

GREG MURPHY: So this is really just the talking point if you want to go back to that.

All right. So I don't really have anything to show on this one. I may add a video to it later, but-- today we have the ability to go back and forth between Revit and Fabrication. So valves are always a hard one to get to fill, right? Because they always change from job to job. So if anybody created a RIF file before, you understand that in the add-in and you do the export, you're going to grab Design Line elements separate from graphical elements, OK?

Why would we want to do that? Well, because some of those things, we're not going to convert. We don't have them in our library, right? So typically I would do pipe and fittings and then do all my pipe accessories as a graphical element to force myself to replace them in the model later with the real ones I need. But if you have your services set up on the front end and you have valves set up in your Design Line services, you can do all of those items as Design Line elements, bring [INAUDIBLE] the RIF. When you go and fill them with Design Line, my preference is to do them by system at a time. So you can see much less data when you convert.

But it won't bring the valves in on the first pass, because you either have to do a direct map of those valves, which takes a lot of time because it's not a multi-selecting process. So what I do is I'll go ahead let it fill, then if you go back to your node edit within Design Line, you can then see all of the nodes that it did not fill because it'll have that full name of the valve in there. Now you can just click the top button, sort for all of those, change that valve name to your button code, and refill and now your valves come in.

DARREN YOUNG: Do we have a video of that in 30 Tips in 60 class that we did for Revit fab parts?

GREG MURPHY: I don't think so.

DARREN YOUNG: I thought we had one on RIP process. I don't know if we covered that specifically.

GREG MURPHY: We'll have to add one to it so they can get that downloaded before.

DARREN YOUNG: All right. So I talked about how I do a lot of editing of product list data. I don't know how many people knew this or not, but you can bulk export and import product list data. You'll notice there's just ITMs and PNGs in there. I can select everything in there, Control-Shift, right-click, and now I can export out all the product list information.

When I go back in here, now you see there's a TXT file in there. That's where I use that Notepad++ to search and standardize my product list names. And then I'll go back and then I'll import that in in bulk. So it doesn't have to be a cumbersome process to go through and really update and standardize those names on hundreds of items.

GREG MURPHY: The key behind that whole thing is that the text file needs to match the ITM name, and then it will suck it right back in when you do the import.

DARREN YOUNG: Here's another one that I didn't know until I actually accidentally had a couple things selected in the Folders view, but if you've got ITMs that you want to do like a search and replace on a naming string, it's built into the Folders view. Maybe a lot of people knew this is obvious.

I've just always right-clicked on one item at a time. I happened to have a second one, and when you click Rename there's a search and replace. In this example, you see I'm actually changing anything that says ROUND to RND. A little bit more efficient sometimes than going back to Windows Explorer to do it because this hits the ITM and the PNG image at the same time.

GREG MURPHY: I always like to add onto that if you have a service that's using that ITM, what did you just do? You just broke your service, right? So now you'll either have to go back and do a path repair or go edit your services you have that used in.

DARREN YOUNG: That's in one of the tips--

GREG MURPHY: It's one of the caveats there so.

DARREN YOUNG: We do cover that one. A couple of years ago, we had the tip on how to do that. Or just email Greg, not me. Greg will cover that one for you.

GREG MURPHY: All right. So this tip right here is really talking about the add-on. I don't have the add-on in anything I'm doing. Is there a video on that one?

DARREN YOUNG: Yeah. I did a video on that.

GREG MURPHY: OK, you did one? So Vulcan now has an add-on to their Trimble FabShop they call it. I haven't heard really great reviews about it, but it's a great way-- why do we do this? One is because our CAM operators don't like change, right? They're worse than any of us in this room, right? So if they're not running CAMduct, or they have CAMduct and Vulcan, and they're more leaning to one side like Vulcan-- I have one of those guys in Denver and he refuses to use it. I've trained him five different times and he always goes back to Vulcan.

So the process here is that we can then save the file right out of CADmep as an add-in to the Vulcan format at import. Then it just becomes a file he opens. He just has to verify all of it rather than manually input every fitting. So he has to add reinforcing to that is one thing I know for sure that it has to be added to those fittings.

DARREN YOUNG: You can tell by my duct layout I'm a sheet metal guy by trade, so.

GREG MURPHY: I'm not sure what you were trying to design there.

DARREN YOUNG: Nothing. All right. Tip number 16. I'll see if I can bring this up in CAM even though we're a little bit behind. A lot of people get confused by the pierce-- go away, NumPad. That's another tip later. When I go into Setup, you'll see this pierce size. Go away.

A lot of people think pierce size of the size of the pierce hole you want in your sheet metal. That is not at all accurate. What that's doing is telling it when you've got a sheet metal layout, any hole that you see at, in this example, 3/16ths or smaller, it won't try to cut it. It'll pierce it instead. So you're telling it a minimum size of hole that you would ever cut and anything that size or smaller, pierce it. But that does not control the pierce size. So if you ever wanted to change the size of the pierce on your controller and you're editing this number, it doesn't seem like it does anything, that's why. But the verbiage is kind of unclear.

Let's see. Another soft tip, just because we need some to catch up on time here. You really should have naming standards in your database, your ITMs and the folders. The ITMs should have some type of a naming scheme, whatever it is. My naming scheme is call it what the manufacturer calls it. Pretty hard to argue with that. But my connectors are named certain ways. I've got the groups named certain ways. Implement naming standards in your database setup. It's going to make it easier to train in a secondary admin. If you want to do any type of filtering or scripting, it's going to make it a lot easier because now you have predictable names.

GREG MURPHY: All right. Switch over.

All right. So if anybody's ever been in here and you right-click and you'll get these two other functions in here. One is called collection and the catalog library. I really haven't been able to find a main difference between the two, other than one's called a collection and one's called a library. They seem to do the same function.

But what they do is if I create a collection in here, what it does is it creates this box of things that I can add to it. So I can add as many things as I want to it. Is this a CAD function? No, because this is just going to throw stuff out in the middle in space. But it's great for estimating if you want to have a collection of things being taken off.

So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to grab these items right here and say, yeah, I want to take these off within this box. So now I can paste them in here and I can go back to my folder. There's my empty box. I'm going to rename it. This is called my junk folder. OK? So this is my stuff of junk. I can now add this to my job and then when I take him off, I get all those items that are within that collection set.

So it's basically creating an assembly on the fly of just whatever the heck you want to throw in there. So it's great for steel or doing any other different miscellaneous things you want to add together. So try using that.

DARREN YOUNG: All right. So here's another tip. If anyone is doing estimating-- probably fewer people doing that than some of the other products-- might use Harrison's sync service to get a lot of the information, look up Harrison codes to embed into your prod info. Copper reducing tee's got like 125 size iterations of that. So I usually set my search results, give me a lot of results. I want a big list.

But a little searching tip. I'll type in 77C and it narrows my list down and I get one of every size. And now I want to look for the 77G. Well, if I clear that search result and type in another one, it has to repopulate it because it's showing everything. 500 items again. And then I just type in a new search result and it shortens it.

You can speed that up a little bit. What I do, I leave the first search result in, type in the second one and now my list turns to nothing. It can't find anything. And then I remove the first search term. So instead of a search on an item, remove the search term, search on the second item, it repopulates that whole 500 line items. If I search on the first item, add the second term, now it shortens that list. It can't find it. I remove the search term and I get my short list back again. Just a little efficiency tip that I use when I'm navigating in CINX to pull information out.

Another tip here is wildcards. I don't how many people are familiar with them but the two main ones are asterisk and question mark. Asterisk would match everything. Question mark would match just a particular character. But you'll use them in reports, mat filter, other places. Like we mentioned earlier, if you implement naming standards, these wildcards really help you search and get a bulk of items quickly.

Are you up, Greg?

GREG MURPHY: All right. So switch over here.

All right. So this really is useful both for any time you're going into your Contents view. So you do Contents view within CADmep, EST, and CAM. I would say CAM users probably would use this very well, as well as estimating. So you now have the ability-- let me go back and show you. So when you go in and look at-- you're organizing your layout here. This is what your layout would be, right? So now you have a group by selection set that you can control a different way.

So if I have the group by selection set on, I can now filter my data by whatever that selection set is. So it's now going and organizing. I think I had service type and description set, so I was trying to go and organize it. So I now have it set by service type. Here's my hangar group. It now groups them by all of that, which is the same kind of way you would look at reporting but now you can look at it in your take off screen that way. And you can have any way you want. You can turn it on, turn it off. Just a quick way to be able to get a view and look for something specific within a service type.

DARREN YOUNG: All right. Another CINX tip that I use. Sometimes I'm looking for a particular valve. So I'm going to type in a 61LF. I get a lot of different products besides the 61LF. They've got different people entering data. Sometimes they don't abbreviate things the same between the products.

So what I'll sometimes do, I'll find a very specific model number down to the size and I'll type that in and search on that item. Now I get one item returned in CINX, but I can look at the description and see what they used for abbreviations. How did they abbreviate bronze? How did they abbreviate lead free? Now I can go back and enter those search terms in and get rid of that very specific one and now I can typically get a list of all the sizes of the exact product I want.

Another little tip here, similar to what Greg was showing on the grouping. We can actually filter. From that view you right-click Filter. And again, we talked about wildcards earlier. This is one place the wildcards do not work. So it's not that that tip is bad. They just don't work in this particular case. But I can filter that list down to specific terms that I'm looking for in those categories.

Want to switch over?

GREG MURPHY: Yeah. Go ahead.

So whatever you're doing Design Line in estimating-- you have your Design Line here. Well, what shows what data you see? When you go to this View Annotate, it's then going to show us what data is there. And where's my nodes? There we go. So what do you see in this information right here is based on the view of the settings for Design Line that you can show or hide within that. So you can see additional information that you may or may not want to see. So if you ever see that pop up, you can control what you want to see on that Design Line when the annotation is on. It helps what's going on at that particular instance for the Design Line.

DARREN YOUNG: All right. Another tip of mine. There's a lot of information to manage, especially if you're doing EST, but even if you don't do EST, you should still be using ProdInfo. It's great for reporting.

When you go into your database, a lot of times you see a lot of holes. There's information that's missing. Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's not. I'll throw dashes in there. So when I look at that, I know that that's not incomplete information that somebody didn't set up or that I forgot to do. I know that I intentionally left that field blank. Now when I'm going through that at my database and I do see empty cells, I know, hey, you know what? There's a missing piece of information I didn't put in there. Just kind of helps isolate what's missing in your database from what is intentionally left blank. Just throw in some blank values, N/A, a couple of dashes, something like that. But I try not to leave those empty cells because there's so much data, I want to know what I've intentionally left blank versus what I've missed.

GREG MURPHY: So I'm just going to add to that. On the screen prior to that-- because that's the supplier screen that he's showing there. On the screen prior to that, that's where all the description information pulls from. You'll notice that they added some additional ones a few years ago for categories for range and finish and that sort of thing. Find a use for those, OK?

We do a lot of high purity work in addition to that, right? When we're running reports we always want to run end types. So if you're buying high purity, you buy high purity with Tri-Clamp by butt weld, or butt weld by butt weld, and if you do any spooling with that it's very specific on how you do high purity spooling. So I use range, range to put in Tri-Clamp by Tri-Clamp clamp as my end type rather than trying to report end one, end two. And it makes a much cleaner report because now you can report right out of that column, because those parts never change as far as the end types.

DARREN YOUNG: Now that you called that up there, just because it says finish doesn't mean that's what you need to use it for.

GREG MURPHY: And then you can add that to your add report that goes on your spools.

DARREN YOUNG: All right. Another little tip on the filtering front.

In addition to the filter, you can actually have it selectable filter. And I can select the information in that column that I want. So I don't have to type in what I'm looking for. It looks at what's already in that list and makes it a little bit easier to filter information. There's a lot of little variations of that filter information.

Converting valves, I think.

GREG MURPHY: Are we up?

DARREN YOUNG: You want me to call you up or you want to just show the screen?

GREG MURPHY: Well, bring up the sheet first.

DARREN YOUNG: All right.

GREG MURPHY: All right. So this isn't any secret information. Again, this is going back to what we were talking about when we're converting Revit inside of Revit. OK? The button code needs to match the valve name within Revit. So go ahead and switch back. There is a help file that explains how to do this.

So whenever you have a service-- so again, this is one of my high purity services. So here's my button coding. But now what I did was I went to Revit and I did a pipe accessories report looking for just valves, because then I went back and applied every valve name that's in Revit because I want to convert them inside of Revit. So when I do my convert to fabrication parts, these valve names need to match and then have a button code of what I want the service to use for that valve. OK?

So if you go and run that report first, export them out as a CSV, do the change that the help file tells you, because you have to replace the colon with an underscore. And then the size goes right after that. Then you can cut and paste them right in here, apply your button code to it, and then your valves will convert inside of Revit. Very handy to have. You can see I have quite a few valves in here that I had to do that with.

DARREN YOUNG: All right. We're running a little behind so I'm not going to show necessarily videos on everything but here's another one. Again, courtesy Scott Hendricks from Applied Software he posted about.

This is something that the estimators who used ESTmep probably knew but a lot of people have forgotten about and it has a lot of merit in place. But you can use a NumPad. One idea I've thought of is all the goofy oval sizes we happen to use up in the Pacific Northwest. I can make a NumPad that allows me to pick which those sizes are.

I've got videos for that that show how that would be used in Design Line or Item Entry to fill in those things. But instead of somebody having to remember what all those goofy combinations are, NumPad might be a good way to do it.

There's a couple of files involved. The KPL is the layout of any one particular tab. And the NPL is actually what the NumPad shows and it references those KPL files to do its layout.

All right. So here's another little tip. This one, one of my coworkers actually started doing this and I thought it was a great idea. He renames his tables. A lot of times we'll get existing reports and how does this thing work? What did they do? And I'm digging into the print objects. What's filtered, what's not filtered, what columns are collapsed. So he'll rename the table and he'll actually put in some descriptions as to what he is doing in that table. Here's how I'm filtering it. Here's what I'm looking for. So now when he goes in that report of he kind of has an idea of how that table is structured.

It takes a little bit extra time to go through and enter that description or update it when you make changes, but if you ever go back into an old report and want to figure out how it worked, that is a really helpful tip to go back in and it just kind of gives you a jump start on what was I thinking when I built that table.

GREG MURPHY: It's not just the header names. You can actually rename the actual item itself that you're using to report with. And that's what he's actually has in there as well. He's renaming those and saying, hey, I'm using this to filter but I'm not printing it. So it's all of that is good information to make it easier to troubleshoot.

All right. So this is just-- so we've got a lot more fabrication reference information there, located on XtraCAD.com. Everybody's probably on XtraCAD. If they're not, you need to be on XtraCAD if you're running CADmep or any of the fabrication products. It's a great way to go through and get some additional help files. So that will be a quick one there.

DARREN YOUNG: Yeah. One word of caution. Keep in mind the source of that information. They're not very trustworthy.

GREG MURPHY: [CHUCKLES]

DARREN YOUNG: The guy that compiles this stuff is of questionable character.

All right. Again, kind of a NumPad thing. Again, Scott Hendricks from Applied Software pointed this out. It's things that I knew but I'd forgotten about or just didn't think about. But same thing in that NumPad. If you name that SpeedPad or SizePad, you can get those things to show up in your Design Line palette in different areas.

Unfortunately, the NumPad, you actually don't get those tabs. You can only have one layout as either one of those. But again, a nice little thing. You can make a little 10-key pad, help speed up some of the entry. Or put in your own information in there.

Another quick tip here because we're running behind, is again, we'll put in blank print objects in our reports. The printed data is below. This is the information I want to extract out. Anything above, now I know is kind of what I'm using to filter and narrow down to that information. We'll put helpful little things like that in the report. Again, makes it quicker if you ever go back, how did I get this thing to work?

Some reports are easy but some take a bit of setup to do, and those helpful little things kind of make it a little bit easier to jump back in and start editing when you need to. Change spec?

GREG MURPHY: Yes. Go ahead and switch over.

DARREN YOUNG: Already did.

GREG MURPHY: All right. So change spec. So on piping, don't normally use change spec, because we're not going to change the piping spec because we're always pointing to the same piping spec for where our materials are. However, we can change insulation with it.

So we normally would have insulation assigned to the service in the properties of that service. We would normally set insulation spec here, right? So we would set the insulation spec to whatever you want to do. So my tip first would be don't try to make anything job-specific when it comes to that insulation break, because we're trying to set insulation thickness by the pipe size break. So start going in there and adding all your different size breaks because we're typically not buying insulation. We're just using it to oversize our hangers and show the thickness of that insulation. So use your different range types.

So here I'm using the equal to or less than a certain size and going on up. So over time as each job comes, you find another one, you add it to the list. Rather than trying to make it job-specific, just make a growing list of your different insulation breaks. OK?

So now once you have those built, you can come back into the system. And I'm in the wrong one. Let's go here. So now once I have a layout, I can then do a change spec. Grab all those items on a service so I can isolate, grab that service or system and do supply and return, do them both at the same time. Now I can switch to my insulation and now I have that whole range of insulation specs that I can apply.

Even if those are locked, it still works. That's why I love this feature. And you hit Apply, hit OK.

DARREN YOUNG: No, I switched you.

GREG MURPHY: Oh, you did? OK, there it goes. It added my insulation. That was my 2 1/2. That's my 3/4 inch line. So it goes through and applies it based on size.

DARREN YOUNG: All right. We're trying to pick it up here a little bit. We're falling behind compared to when we did this earlier.

GREG MURPHY: We've got some quick ones. Go.

DARREN YOUNG: CAD Blocks. Use CAD Blocks if you want additional detail. Good place where I've done that is on HVAC equipment. It's not symmetrical. It is directional but it's pretty close to symmetrical. Sometimes that equipment'll get put in reversed. We'll embed a 3D arrow so we know the direction of it.

Unfortunately, the CAD Blocks don't work in ESTmep worth a hoot and they are not supported on the Revit side of things. But if you're in CADmep, they can be helpful. You can apply a single CAD Block to a whole ITM, or you can even add it in a product list information so they're size specific.

Another little tip here. Trying to clean up your configuration. Sometimes we get bracketed connectors and materials. I felt dumb when I sent this to Autodesk and they came back. Check your double wall settings. You might have a material stuck in the double wall. They don't really set it back to None when you turn it off because it's turned off.

Not every ITM will suck that material in, but I've run into some and occasionally it will. It'll suck in the double wall connectors or seams. But if you've got an ITM and it just seems to keep bringing in the material, that could be where it's at.

You want to switch over?

GREG MURPHY: Yes, let's see if I can make this one happen here. It's died on me. All right. So go ahead and show that screen. So in estimating-- go ahead and switch back to that one real quick.

So in estimating, we have the ability to modify costs of items and we can do this-- haven't done this in a while so I don't remember exactly where we're pulling this from, but basically-- I don't remember if this is on one item or if this is in the take off information screen, estimating screen. Let's see if this is it.

DARREN YOUNG: Two days ago, he knew what this tip was. He's already forgotten.

GREG MURPHY: I've already forgotten the tip, yep. Probably used it a couple times. But you can go in and-- if I could remember where it is. Anyway, do you remember where this one was?

DARREN YOUNG: No, I do not.

GREG MURPHY: You wrote this one up.

DARREN YOUNG: No, I didn't. That was you.

GREG MURPHY: Anybody remember where this one is? Who wants it? Everybody's saying no?

DARREN YOUNG: If anyone needs it, just email us and we'll figure it out.

GREG MURPHY: So with this tip though, there is a warning, if you look at that warning there. You can go pull up and change the costing on that item within it. And it will add that change in the database. And that's what that warning says is this particular change will actually happen in your database. So this may be a good thing, may be a bad thing. Again, if you're doing estimating it might be specific for that job. So you may be doing an estimating job and have it saved that way, and then you can have that change directly in that job instead of your main database.