[Doug McLean]

Unfortunately, you can’t group those tools together like that.

I do something very similar with my RFI process, except I just keep a list of them.

I also have a custom form built that the information goes to, which I use to populate an entire log of my RFI’s when I need it.

[Corbin Steinmuller]

That is unfortunate, but i appreciate the feedback.

Do you have any documentation on that form, list and workflow?
we are about to commence the onboarding of several new estimators and id like to be able to manage the influx of RFI’s that will likely come from them to be listed and reviewed by seniors estimators before being escalated to clients.

[Doug McLean]

not formally, but its not a problem.

I do use Power Query inside of Excel to bring everything together. If you’re not familiar with that part of Excel it might not be as much value to you though.

What is important is to name your Form Fields. (so you will need Complete or Extreme)
When you want to combine them all you just use the Merge Data function on the Form Menu (Tools>Forms>Merge Data) and it will generate a csv file for you.

Then its just a case of cleaning the data for your use.

New-RFI-Form.pdf 205 KB PDF - Click to view

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[Corbin Steinmuller]

Perfect, thanks for the clear explanation ill have an attempt at setting this up

[David Cutler]

One option might be to create a series of “RFI Cloud Tools” that have the number pre-populated so that when you selected “RFI 1” from your tool chest you’d have “RFI 1” in the text box, select “RFI 2” for the next one, etc. You could have tool chest with 100 tools – or groups of 10, whatever works best for your workflow. Once you use “RFI X” delete it from the tool chest so that RFI X+1 is at the top of the tool chest ready to be selected next.

This is probably more of an analog option than you’re looking for @corbin – but it could save some work in the future.

[Corbin Steinmuller]

Maybe not as automated as i imagined, but it might be the way to go as i am finding the sequence doesn’t carry across my Set and each page the sequence resets because each page in my set is saved and treated as an individual document.

Do you have any work arounds for managing this with the sequence feature?

[David Cutler]

Unfortunately I don’t have a good trick to automate this @corbin

A relatively painless way to create a series of tools would be to create a blank PDF that you use to create your tools on. Create your RFI 1 tool and apply it 10 times on the sheet and then edit the caption for your sequence. Next copy those 10 markups and paste them into another column and make those 11-20 and so on.

In your tool chests window create a “RFI” tool chest. Once you build out the number that you want to have available select them all, right click and save them to your RFI tool chest.

Realistically you could probably build out 100 tools in an hour or 2 and have them available to use over and over again.

You could up your game with some custom columns to collect various pieces of information related to the RFI that could later be exported to create a RFI log….

[Doug McLean]

Yeah, the sequence tool doesn’t really work well across multiple documents. It works much better in a single.

[Troy DeGroot]

I agree the sequence tool is not as powerful as most people would like because of its limitations. I think @DavidCutler is on the right track with custom tools. I like to build a delta symbol (triangle) and overlay a text markup RFI#. Then group them and add it to your toolset. Your user should know what the next RFI number is in the sequence, once they place it, they can double-click and update the #. This way you only need one tool and they should all be organized properly in the markup list. I also like to hyperlink the actual RFI document to the markup for quick access when navigating the plans.

I’ve also built a delta with ANS# or something like that so when an an answer comes back I can place the symbol, match the RFI # and hyperlink to the response document. This way the question and answer are all stored where they need to be, directly on the plan. You could even go as far as custom statuses for answered/unanaswered.