2 May 2022
How To Survive the Constant Demands for Change in the MicroStation World
Day after day, MicroStation® managers and users ask us for solutions to the latest time-consuming problems that have been tossed their way. Most of the time, these problems are due to orders to bring about consistency in the CAD environment or a client’s last-minute demands.
Axiom’s MicroStation Productivity Toolkit™ comprises a package of MicroStation utilities that gives you the power to handle these constant demands for change, gracefully and quickly. While every shop doesn’t necessarily have a major problem daily, there are numerous situations that occur regularly in any CAD environment, where having a tool designed to make the types of changes you need on multiple design files could save you or your users many hours of painful, manual work. Let’s take a look at some typical examples and see how MicroStation Productivity Toolkit can take some of the sting out of change!
Without FileFixer, effectively repairing this file fast enough to meet the deadline could be impossible.
Changing design file settings on the fly!
You’ve got a project nearing completion and need to make a submittal to your customer. Because the fifty files in the project are being changed daily, with MicroStation alone there is no telling what condition the level display and view attributes were left in by the last user without opening up each file. Then you have to make the needed adjustments and save the settings. If you had Global File Changer™ (a component of MicroStation Productivity Toolkit), you could set up a simple command file that would turn on the views you wanted; turn off the ones you didn’t want; set the level displays for each view according to the standard; adjust the necessary display settings; fit the views you wanted; and save the settings.
This series of steps could then be run on all fifty design files automatically one after the other in just a few minutes. The command file you created could be saved and reused every time design files needed to be sent to that customer. If you have multiple customers, the same command file can be copied with an appropriate name and adjusted to match each client’s submittal demands.
Change the hand that file corruption deals you
We also hear about how “Murphy’s Law” applies to the MicroStation community. Take the following as an example. A large project is due tomorrow. MicroStation displays an error dialog when you attempt to open the file. The last backup was done last week. Without FileFixer™, another MicroStation Productivity Toolkit component, effectively repairing this file fast enough to meet the deadline could be impossible. With FileFixer, a complete repair usually takes less than five minutes — start to finish — and you’re back in business.
Changing reference file settings to meet a standard
Has this one ever happened to you? Your customer insists that reference file full paths must not be saved. In addition, they demand that logical names of the border reference files be “Border C”, “Border D”, and so on. Instead, your designer inadvertently saved the full path and used “C Sheet”, “D Sheet”, and so on, as the logical names. For a project of forty sheet files, with four to ten reference files each, it could easily take hours to correct the settings in all the sheet files. With RefManager™, yet another component of MicroStation Productivity Toolkit, you could remove any saved full path and change the appropriate logical names in a single automated pass that wouldn’t take more than ten minutes.
With RefManager, you could remove any saved full path and change the appropriate logical names in a single automated pass that wouldn’t take more than ten minutes.
MicroStation Productivity Toolkit has the right tools!
For more than 30 years, Axiom has been working with CAD professionals to build and enhance the tools in MicroStation Productivity Toolkit to provide effective solutions for the thousands of different problems that can come up in any MicroStation shop. MicroStation Productivity Toolkit includes programs that make short work of reference file problems, cell library management, design file corruption repair, quality assurance checks, bulk file manipulation, annoying duplicate element removal, import of large Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, design file comparisons and much, much more.
