6 - Sheet Notes

I guess it's been a while since my last post, and I was beginning to feel quite guilty for starting something and not following through. Just don't hold your breath for daily posts.

For the longest time, our template used legends for general sheet notes. This worked fairly well since legends can be placed on multiple sheets and a single update affects all instances. However, our new approach is one that has greater advantages, especially for larger projects.

We created a generic annotation with three instance parameters: Grouping, Number & Text. Together with some linework, this creates a 'physical' placeholder for sheet notes within the model. Some notes are longer than others, so we've allowed plenty of room within the annotation family to accommodate long bits of text.

Once loaded into the project, a drafting view will hold all notes.

Each column represents a Grouping. For each, I've created 30 notes, most of which are blank.

Using a NoteBlock, we can now schedule every instance of this family. We'll sort by Grouping & Number. This schedule is the easiest & fastest way to make edits to notes.

We'll now duplicate that same schedule and use filters to narrow it down to a specific category & to hide blank notes. The '99' filter is used to hide a note from the sheet, while keeping it in the project. This way, for whatever reason, it can be added back easily. Any noted filled out in our main schedule will append automatically.

After some tweaks to the schedule's formatting, the end result looks about the same as our legends from before, but the advantage we now have is that these notes are parametric and therefore schedule-able. And since they are schedule-able, they are also searchable. Large projects can contain hundreds of notes, and having the ability to filter them in a separate working schedule based on a specific word or series of words is invaluable. It certainly has proved its worth already.

Edit: I created a follow up post here.