Using Schedules for Notes

Here I want to talk about an alternative to creating blocks of text that eliminates the "jumping" effect when editing. Generally to avoid this, one might generate a legend view where each piece of the note is an individual line of text.  Yes, this will prevent the "jumping"; however, not very efficient when you have to edit.  Therefore our office has moved to using schedules to better help with this task. I have outlined our process below.

Take for example GENERAL DRAWING NOTES:


First we generate our schedule by choosing an object category that is not used in our day-to-day workflow.  In our case, this is the Mass category.  The next step is important, but easy to miss. Once you have decided on your category, choose the Schedule Keys radial button.  By assigning this schedule as a schedule key, you can insert rows as needed without having the physical object in the model. Next, give your schedule an appropriate name.

Next you will define your schedule properties, and this is where you have to be careful. You will notice that your Available Fields are limited to Comments.  Well this is great, but if I have more than one of these type of schedules (ie. GENERAL PARTITION NOTES, GENERAL DEMOLITION NOTES, etc..) you will notice that the Comments field is no longer available.  When dealing with key schedules of the same category, you can only use a parameter once.  What I like to do is create a unique parameter for each one of these general schedules I create.  In this case I will create a parameter called Gen Dwg Notes.  Be sure to change the Type of Parameter to "Text" as this defaults to Length.

Now that the schedule is created, I rename the header to "GENERAL DRAWING NOTES", sort the schedule by key name, and modify my formatting and appearance to office standards.  Now I am free to add and remove rows as needed.

This method is really nice because it makes it easy to manage, sort and organize your notes.  Because this is a schedule, you can place them on multiple sheets (if needed) and updating one will update them all.

A finished schedule might look like:

 Enjoy!
Make it, don't fake it.