[Doug McLean]

Sets and Studio Projects are, in a word, complicated.

@lizlarsen is probably your go to person on this

[Vince French]

Thanks @Doug!

I wasn’t sure if I was needing to look at sets or if there was some other way of inserting new and / or updated drawings into a Project? I know I’ve already bored everyone about this but, due to how inconsistent our designers are with how they name drawings, sets are extremely difficult to use here in the UK.

I thought slip sheeting was going to be the answer but that doesn’t necessarily seem to be the case.

I was looking at Projects and possibly a Dashboard but it’s essential that I can easily import new information.

[Dwane Lindsey]

Projects are a way for you to get the files into a “cloud” storage and also enable file locking so that only 1 person can edit a file at any given time. It’s a check out/check in type system. That is at a very basic level the difference between files on a shared server vs files in a Project.

Slip Sheeting in my mind is the easiest way to change out sheets for new versions. It definitely helps if you have Extreme (or Complete now for 22) so you can batch Slip Sheet. It allows for replacement of the sheet, copy markups and stamp the old sheet with a Superseded markup.

I’ve never really been a fan of Sets, especially since they never carried over to the “old” iPad app (I don’t think they carry over to the cloud app either). I would rather use the Batch Link feature to have all the documents linked to each other.

Here’s where the fun begins 🙂 If you use Projects, batch slip sheeting is a major pain as you need to check out every file that will be slip sheeted. To combat this, I’ve had people keep a set of the files on the network and do all the linking (relative paths are key) and slip sheeting there. Then, upload these new files into the Project.

I guess the question would be…what are you looking to accomplish or fix by using a Project? Sets are a glorified bookmarking system (in my mind) and can be done without using Projects. Slip sheeting can be done (and almost better to be done) outside of using Projects.

[Vince French]

Thanks @Dwane.

I was just looking at ways to manage a project with people being based in different offices and also on-site. I started out thinking that a Studio project would allow everyone access to the files that they need.

But then I started looking at how to upload or updated new drawings of which there are loads. There can be issues of multiple drawings every few days so updating one by one isn’t an option.

Sets doesn’t work here in the UK because of the way files are named – there is no standard format or consistency.

To be honest, the whole process is proving a bit painful!

[David Cutler]

@Vince perhaps you could “coach” your clients (or their clients) to require consistent file naming from their designers. If part of their design agreement is that files are to named following an established naming convention and the client enforces this requirement I’d expect that the designers would shape up quickly after being required by the client to rename 500 files to meet the standards a few times… 🙂

“What is important to my boss is important to me”, Author Unknown – but a very smart person for sure!

[Vince French]

If I only had that level of influence @David Cutler !

Apparently, I’m currently causing enough issues by asking for engineers’ designs to be something that we can actually construct on-site instead of being a group of lines which just look very neat on a screen.

If I now asked for a sensible file naming convention then, I think a few heads will explode!

However, in all seriousness, I think the issue here is that many of our clients upload their drawings to Viewpoint, Doc Hosting, etc and I’m assuming that those programmes handle the filenames better than Revu so the client doesn’t see what the actual problem is???

[David Cutler]

So I guess asking for a PDF that includes layers with a naming structure that doesn’t require a PHD to translate is out of the question? 🤣

[Vince French]

🤣

[Doug McLean]

Sets are nothing more than a collection of individual pages.
I find working this way on the cloud to be much easier and faster than dealing with an entire 200 page document.
A quick cheat for working with Individual pages is to only open your Drawing Index. Then you can open the other pages via the hyperlinks.
So you get all the benefits of a Set, without actually USING a Set.

[Vince French]

Thanks @Doug!

Are you storing your drawings on Sharepoint or somewhere else?
Maybe I’ll try sets with the next set of tender drawings that I receive.

[Doug McLean]

We keep ours on SharePoint.

You can actually use it like a Studio Project if you open your files through the DMS toolbar. It opens with the same ‘check out’ feature.

Be careful working on SharePoint and opening files through File Explorer. Two people can have the same document open at the same time because of the way Windows opens it. If the second person saves it, it will override your markups.

[Vince French]

Thanks Doug that’s very useful info!