[Troy DeGroot]

I’m not sure what you mean by “distance behind curb” in relation to the rise/drop. I’m confident you know how it works, but Rise/drop is intended to measure the vertical (unseen) part of a horizontal markup. I’d be curious to see your tools and how you’re using them. To your question.. I don’t think there’s a way to convert them, the best I can think of is to draw an example of each of your tools on a blank pdf, then draw a Polylength line next to each one. Use the Format Painter to copy the properties from the existing tools to the new polylength lines. select all of them and add the rise/drop, layers, and whatever else needs to be adjusted. Replace the tools in your toolset. I like to keep these “worksheets” to archive the process of creating tools. That way if anything breaks or gets lost I can go back to the original. I hope this helps David, thanks for posting!

[David Cutler]

Thank you for the quick reply @troydegroot

“Distance behind curb” would be similar to “height above floor” for a wire run – I’m just looking to add an additional horizontal length rather than a vertical length. For the civil site side “distance behind curb” is a typical term for how far from the edge of the road we extend utilities towards the house.

I guess the biggest lesson of the day is that our tools should be “polylength” measurements rather than “perimeter” measurements. Hopefully others can learn from this experience!

[David Cutler]

The plot thickens!

One of my custom columns is setup to capture the quantity that was measured. Unfortunately the way I have this configured the quantity reported doesn’t include the rise/drop quantity – so a service that is 40 lf to the curb with a 10 lf extension that should indicate a 50 ft total still displays 40 ft…

Time to dig back into my custom column setup and see if I can figure how to get it to capture the rise/drop quantity.

[David Cutler]

And thickens…

I was able to modify the formula in my custom column for “Quantity” to include the “Rise/Drop” value. Unfortunately, when I added this to the formula the system stopped reporting a value in the “Quantity” column for any measurement that doesn’t have a “Rise/Drop” value. Ugh.

Time to go back to the old fashioned way to get this one off my desk. I’m open to suggestion @troydegroot and others!

[Troy DeGroot]

Is the quantity formula pulling the total length? I’m surprised it doesn’t include the rise/drop since that more of a background property entry.

[David Cutler]

I might have to turn in my Brainery card @troydegroot . Turns out it was working correctly the entire time and I didn’t realize that was the case. What was throwing me off was that the “Comments” column was indicating “L = 14′-11″ Rise/Drop = 10′-0″ ” and my custom “Quantity” column was indicating “15” when I thought it should be returning “25” (14′-11″ + 10′-0″). When I went and scaled this dimension on the plan I found that the base measurement was in this example 4′-11″ (from the water main to the curb). This means that the value in the custom “Quantity” column was correct at “15” (4′-11″ + 10′-0″).

So a couple of lessons learned:

1. If you want to use “Rise/Drop” make sure your tool is setup as a “Polylength” measurement not a “Perimeter” measurement type.

2. When using “Rise/Drop” check your measurements to ensure you know what your base (horizontal) measurement is and that you are getting the output that you are expecting.

3. The “L” value in the “Comments” column includes the “Rise/Drop = X’-X” ” quantity.

Thank you for the opportunity to work through this. Hopefully it will help others in the future!

[Troy DeGroot]

Never a need to turn in your Brainery card! 😂

I use the Perimeter tool for retaining walls, wall panel returns, and other things that are line-based, but have a Z-plan depth value. If you’re using Quantity Link the value that is transferring to Excel is actually the “Length” value, which should also include length + rise/drop. This was a great post for thinking through how the tool actually works. Thanks for posting David!