One of the more overlooked capabilities of scheduling is to supply a new value or change a value for many items with a single entry. Many schedules that people use list every instance within the project. This means you have to find some other way to update all those families quickly. Unless you revisit the sorting criteria of a schedule.
Let's take a simple example a room schedule. I have a number of rooms that need to change, they are all lower case instead of upper case (The Change Case tool from Avatech makes this easier still). I also need to supply a department value for each room.
When a schedule lists every instance of the rooms we get a nice long list of each room. Like this one...not nearly as long as most real schedules though.
If we change the sorting/grouping criteria to use Name instead and un-check the option "Itemize Every Instance" we'll get a different result.
Like This...(I added a count column to show how they've been condensed according to the same "name").
Edit the Name and Department parameters and the values will be applied to each instance of the multiple rooms, like this...(removed the sorting change and restored the sort by number and "Itemize every instance").
Typing EXAM in the Name field supplied the value to all seven of the rooms using that name. The same is true for the SERVICES department name. The same is true for the other repeated values.
In the future, to use this, just remember that you need to sort a schedule by THE value that needs alteration AND you need to un-check "Itemize every Instance".
Remember too, there is nothing wrong with having a schedule that makes your daily work life easier and one that your clients/readers see, a quality assurance schedule and the final "report". Happy "reporting"!
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