Creating Calculated Value Parameters in Schedules

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Creating Calculated Value Parameters in Schedules.

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In this video, we'll create Material Takeoff Schedules,

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that include a new Calculated Formula Parameter as well as a Calculated Percent Parameter.

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I'm working in the Small Medical Center project in a 3D View.

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And you can see that there are multiple types of wall materials, including brick and wood panels as you can see here.

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I want to create Material Takeoff Schedules for these materials that include the total cost per square foot of the materials.

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In the Project browser, I'm scrolling down to the Schedule Quantities Area and opening up "Brick Wall Material Takeoff".

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You can see that it already has three items in it, the Material Name, Area and Cost.

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I now want to add a new field that will tell me the total cost of the material.

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So, in the Properties dialog box in the Fields area, I'm clicking "Edit".

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Then I come into my "Material Takeoff Properties" and I'm going to add a Calculated Parameter.

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First of all, I'm going to go ahead and add a new name, total cost per square foot.

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And I'm gonna make sure that's a formula that's common and it's a number.

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So, of course, there's other options you can do here. And then you can type in the formula.

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Now, when you type in formulas, it's very important for two things.

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One is the fields have to already be available.

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And you can see that I have Area and Cost here.

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Those are the ones I want to use.

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The other thing is that they need to be spelled exactly correctly.

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So, it's better to use this Browse button.

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I'm going to click the "Browse" button, select "Material Area", "OK".

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I'm then going to space type in an asterisk for multiply, return to the browse and select "Material Cost" and click "OK" again.

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Now, when I click "OK", you'll see that we've got inconsistent units.

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So, the problem here, area is in square feet, the material cost is in general numbers.

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So, what I need to do is add a little bit of an extra formula.

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I'm gonna put parentheses around material area and then I'm gonna divide it by 1.

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This strips the units from the area information and allows it to work.

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So, I now have my new field.

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I want to go ahead first and change the formatting of this a little bit.

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So, first of all, I'm gonna align it right, which is something you need when you're using numbers.

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I also want to change my field format.

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I'm going to change it from Default Settings,

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and set it up to be Currency with two decimal places and a unit symbol of dollars since I'm in the US.

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I'm going to click "OK".

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I also need to make sure that the calculation is going to show the calculate totals.

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So, we need that in this particular case.

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And I'm gonna click "OK".

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And here's my total cost per square feet already set up, including the overall number.

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Now, if I change the Material Cost, so, for example, we got some cheaper brick, I can change that to $12 a square foot.

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And it automatically updates all of the total cost, a very powerful piece of information.

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It is simple to create another Material Takeoff Schedule based on this first one.

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In the Project browser, I'm going to right click on the Schedule, Duplicate View, Duplicate.

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And then I'm going to change the name and I can actually do it up here.

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I don't have to do it down in the Schedule Quantities.

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So, I'm gonna make this Wood Panel Materials Takeoff.

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Get rid of the Copy 1.

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You'll notice it still says its brick, so let's change that.

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All I have to do is change my Filter and select the Wood Panels as my Material Type.

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Now, I already have a cost set up for this, and it adds in the total cost per square foot as well.

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I'm going to duplicate the schedule again.

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This time I want to create a material by percent.

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So, first of all, I'm going to change the name and I'm going to call this Wall Material by Percent.

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The next thing I need to do is change the filter.

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In this case, I want all the wall materials except for Air.

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So, I'm going to go ahead and say, does not equal Air.

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I also need to change the sorting and grouping.

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So, I'm gonna change my sorting and grouping to takeoff itemize every instance.

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You can see here, everything's itemized, I click "OK".

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And now I'm just down to each of the different material names and not every instance.

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It shows up the Material Cost that I could add in.

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But you'll notice that it does not show the material area because it can't do that without having every instance itemized.

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So, let's make a new field.

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I'm going to add Calculated Parameter.

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I'm going to call it Wall Material by Percent.

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And I'm gonna use the Percentage type.

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So, in this case, all I can choose from are my fields.

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And what I want to use here is the wall area, and I also want to do a grand total and I'll click "OK".

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Now I want to move this one up to second place here and click "OK" again.

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I now have Wall Material by Percent and I can turn off my wall area.

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I need to use Hide Columns and not the Lead Columns, because the field is actually used in the percentages.

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So, now I have several Material Takeoff Schedules where we've leveraged the I in BIM using custom created Calculated Parameters.