QC Sheet

I absolutely love schedules. I often create working schedules to check for errors or completeness of our model. Rather than opening every schedule, I had this idea to create a QC sheet where all these schedules can quickly be viewed from one single place. From there, I can edit the schedule and make the necessary corrections. The sheet is assigned to its own category, and set to not appear in sheet lists.

Over the length of the project, I have created over 30 schedules that check properties of sheets, views, keynotes, generic annotations, walls, sheet notes, rooms, doors, travel distances and even structural usage of CMU walls. This turns out to be really handy for daily maintenance, but especially in those last minutes before printing.

My approach with these schedules is to filter out those elements which are in compliance and thereby exposing those that are not. This makes it pretty easy to check, since the end goal is an empty schedule. For example, my current project only allows the use of fire rated gypsum board; however, imported typical details may be using regular gypsum board. A simple Keynote Legend can list any instances where regular gypsum board is keynoted. From there, by selecting Highlight in Model, I can find and correct any culprits.

Here are some other examples:

• Unreferenced keynotes (a value is assigned, but no matching description can be found in the keynote txt file)
• Blank keynotes (a keynote is placed, but no value is assigned, leaving just a question mark)
• 000000 keynotes (when placing a keynote, the user doesn’t always know what to assign. When ‘Ok’ is hit instead of ‘Cancel’ the first value is assigned)
• Rooms (any room that’s not properly enclosed, or isn’t placed)
• Sheet notes containing an incomplete reference (as a company standard, we use underscores to indicate unknown characters. For example “Refer to sheet AE-1.___”
• Sheets missing important parameters
• Egress paths exceeding maximum travel distance (we use railings as so many bloggers have posted about)
• Generic annotations with blank parameters (one noteblock schedule per parameter)
• Working Views placed on a sheet (we use a custom parameter to distinguish between printing views and working views)
• Printing Views not placed on a sheet

In addition, I also set up general information schedules:

• Door types used (this is a good way to make sure our legends show each type used)
• Door frame types used
• Door fire rating (to confirm the fire rating still matches the family type name)
• Window types used
• Wall types used

I’d be interested in hearing your uses of check-schedules.