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Like V8i? You'll Love CONNECT - Sheet Tracking and Ordering

In MicroStation V8i, while working on a project, sheet numbering, sheet ordering, and tracking was mostly manual and hence tedious and error-prone. There were also some key limitations. Let us see what the pains in V8i were and how these have been alleviated in the CONNECT Edition.

Creating a sheet index – In V8i, the workflow for creating a sheet index was:

Create a link set.
Add sheets to the link set.
Adjust the sheet numbering – Note that you could not add alphanumeric numbering to sheets in V8i. Also, leading zero was not supported in the sheet numbering property.
Any changes in the sheets or reordering of sheets required manually updating the renumbering.
Total sheet count value needed to be calculated manually for inserting in the title block. Any changes to the total sheet count need to be updated manually in all the sheets, which is actually a big pain.

Sheet Numbering

Most commonly, the sheet numbering contains standards contains much more than just numeric number. For example, the US National CAD standard (v5), specifies the following components in sheet identification:

Where,

A = for alphabetical character
N = numerical character

In V8i, you could not add alphabetical character in sheet numbers. So, there wasn’t a straightforward way to achieve this. The work-around was to use Sheet Name property or Sheet Name and Sheet Number properties in combination to achieve this. However, the limitation to these workarounds was that you could not update the numbering automatically.

Solution: In CONNECT Edition, you have the readymade Sheet Index feature. The key advantages of using sheet index over V8i manual sheet indexing are:

On sheet creation itself, you can add sheets to the sheet index.
Sheet numbering can be alpha-numeric.
You can customize the sheet numbering as per your standard.
Total sheet count field can be used to mention the total sheet count. Changes to total sheet count are automatically updated.

The following is a high-level comparison of the sheet numbering workflow between V8i and CONNECT. It will give you an idea how sheet numbering is efficient and fast is in CONNECT over V8i.

MicroStation V8i	MicroStation CONNECT Edition
1. Create a link set	1. Define sheet numbering rules and organize category-wise folders within sheet index
2. Manually add sheets to the link set.	2. Add sheets to the sheet index (You can also add sheets automatically on sheet creation)
3. Number the sheets	3. Place alphanumeric sheet number as well as total sheet count as text fields in the title block
4. Place sheet prefix as text followed by sheet number as a text field in the title block of each sheet	4. When sheets are added/removed, the sheet index and sheet numbering is automatically updated.
5. Place total sheet count as a number
6. When sheets are added/removed, manually change total sheet count in each sheet

There are many more advantages of using the sheet indexing feature in CONNECT Edition. The upcoming blogs will cover them.

You may also find the following articles useful:

Managing Sheet Index

Including Custom Properties in the Sheet Index Report

If you are interested in speaking with a Bentley expert about making the move to MicroStation CONNECT Edition, please complete this form to have someone contact you to provide advice and assistance.