26 October 2010
Updated 23 November 2021
Disorganized and Non-Standard MicroStation Cell Libraries Taking a Toll on Your Time?
Have you ever wanted to set up a new cell library composed of certain cells that are presently located in three or four (or more) cell libraries in various locations all over your network? CellManager™ allows you to easily manipulate multiple cell libraries at the same time. With CellManager, you can view, sort, filter, modify, extract from and report on all of the applicable cells, regardless of how many different cell libraries your needed cells reside in. When you find the cells you want, you simply export them to your new cell library (or to an existing library). You can export them into the new cell library one cell at a time or you can select all the cells you want and then export them all at once.
CellManager automatically creates a cell library notebook — complete with a table of contents — in PDF format, so users can quickly find the exact cell they want to use.
CellManager includes very sophisticated filtering options that can isolate smaller subsets of cells, allowing you to work with smaller groups of cells at a time. When dealing with multiple cell libraries, you might have several hundred or several thousand cells. Using CellManager’s “Select Cells” filters, you can limit the cells you work with to include only those cells that meet certain criteria — for example, only those cells that contain text or only those cells that have component elements on particular levels. These filters are in addition to filtering by cell name and description. When filtering for cell name and description, you can also use wildcards or the more advanced string matching system known as “regular expression” to make finding exactly what you want as easy as possible.
You can also automatically extract cells from existing design files.
Have you ever had a situation where the standard cells you want don’t exist in available cell libraries but you do have designs that contain them? CellManager allows you to automatically extract all the cells, shared cells or blocks from one or more MicroStation® design files or AutoCAD® drawing files and put them into a new cell library. Once extracted, it is a simple matter with CellManager to edit or modify any aspect of the cell, such as the cell’s name, description, scale, levels or even the cell’s graphics or origin. Once finished, you can export any or all of the cells to the cell library of your choice.
CellManager has other time-saving features such as the ability to batch import individual AutoCAD block files (that are commercially available for many design disciplines) directly into a target MicroStation cell library.
Another useful and time-saving feature when organizing and evaluating large quantities of cells in various cell libraries is CellManager’s reporting function, which creates a report of any or all cell information and places the data into a user-defined and user-formatted text file. This is one way that CellManager lets you quickly see what component element types are used within each cell, which levels component elements are on, which cells contain nested cells, the nested cell’s name and what colors, weights and line styles are used by the component elements. These and many more text report options are readily available to you in CellManager.
CellManager can scale all the selected cells, from multiple libraries, in one step.
Whenever you are consolidating cells from multiple libraries or utilizing cells extracted from other sources, some amount of modification to the cells is usually needed. Bulk changes to cells are quick and easy with CellManager. For example, if you extracted a bunch of cells from design files that use metric measurements and wanted to use these cells in design files using Imperial units, then you may need to rescale those cells. CellManager can rescale a selected cell or all the cells you want in batch. CellManager also lets you modify level, color, weight, style and even text font and text size on a single cell or on multiple cells at the same time. You can even do search and replace on text within cells.
Once you have your cell library set up just right, use CellManager’s “Draw Pages” feature to quickly create and plot a complete notebook in PDF format of your entire cell library that you can distribute to your users. The notebook includes graphics as well as other important information about each cell. The notebook even includes a table of contents that lists each cell by name and description, along with the page number where it can be found.
Need to Standardize Your Cell Libraries? Call Now!
For more information on CellManager or to schedule a free, online demonstration, contact an Axiom MicroStation Consultant today! Call 727-442-7774 or visit Axiom on the web at www.AxiomInt.com now!
