By Garry Stockton
On a recent training course, a delegate asked how he could organise his Drawing Sheets better, making it easier for non-technical project team members to locate the appropriate sheets.
Ideally your drawing sheets should follow a numbering system, typically starting with a letter (A for Architectural, M for Mechanical, E Electrical and S Structural etc.) followed by a series of numbers. Generally, these get grouped together. So, for example the:
• 0-Series may contain cover sheets, general notes etc.
• 1-series may contain the plans,
• 2-Series may contain Elevations,
• 3-Series may contain Sections etc….
There is no right or wrong way and each company will have their own structure. If we don't organise our sheets in the project browser, we can get a situation like the following:
As you can see there are a lot of sheets and we would need to scroll down and try and find the one we want to view. An easy way to organise this a bit better is to group the Sheets by their Prefix/Sheet series number. If we open our Browser Organisation dialog box, on the sheets tab find Sheet Prefix and select Edit.
Under the Grouping and Sorting Tab, change leading characters number up to 3 (this is 1 by default). This sorts the sheets into manageable groups for easier navigation:
See example using 3 leading characters.