How to do it fast!

BY RICK DEWITT
MICROSTATION SOLUTION SENSEI

Saving time and making more profit on projects are evidence of doing your job right. MicroStation cells, leveraged fully, reduce drafting time and increase profits. A new way to leverage cells is to place them as “annotation cells” in models that will be referenced to sheets that have different annotation scales. Cells placed this way in the model will display at the right size based on the annotation scale of the referencing sheet. Done this way, you only have to place the cell once in the model, rather than having to place it in each individual sheet at the scale needed for correct display.

For your MicroStation cells to use this feature, the cell itself must have the “Can be placed as an annotation cell” property turned on. You may also need to rescale your cells so that users can place them at an appropriate default scale in the model files they create.

Another aggravating situation that frequently happens, particularly when old MicroStation V7 cell libraries are upgraded to V8, is that the cells don’t have standard working units, like feet or meters assigned to them. In this case, they come in “unitless” and they frequently have a working resolution that isn’t ideal or correct for use in V8.
Finding and fixing these problems through hundreds of cells in multiple cell libraries is a daunting task — unless you have the newest version of CellManager!

Using CellManager, you can easily isolate cells, from multiple cell libraries at a time, that contain specific working units or a specified working resolution, or that have the “can be placed as an annotation cell” setting turned on. Not only that, but with the newest CellManager you can also change the working units to any value you want and change the working resolution and annotation cell setting on any or all the cells in one or multiple cell libraries at once.

Need to find and change the working resolution on 200 cells from 11 different cell libraries containing a total of say 650 cells? How many days or weeks would that take you to do manually? Conservatively, with CellManager, your looking at maybe an hour. Need to turn on the “Can be placed as an annotation cell” setting on those same 200 cells? Add maybe ten minutes. Need to rescale them all after making them annotation cells? Again, if you use CellManager, we’re talking maybe ten more minutes.

Figure 1. CellManager is capable of changing the working units and working resolution on hundreds of cells throughout multiple cell libraries — in minutes!

What else can I do with CellManager?
- Create complete cell library documentation, ready for plotting, including graphic images, details and even an index for any cell library, in a matter of several minutes.
- Extract all the cells, from one or more MicroStation design files, into a cell library automatically.
- Copy or move cells from one cell library to another.
- Create custom cell selector files automatically from a tagged list of cells.
- Import AutoCAD blocks into a MicroStation cell library.
- Much, much more.

Want to Get Your MicroStation Cell Libraries Correct and Under Control Fast? Call Now!
To schedule a free, online demonstration or for more information on CellManager, contact an Axiom MicroStation Consultant today. Call 727-442-7774 or e-mail Infomail@AxiomInt.com now!