Space - The Final Frontier?

Maybe. But you don't have to go far to find some great possibilities. In ADT, Space Objects or Spaces have some of the greatest potential for scheduling and time saving. There are a few different situations you may find yourself in - creating a project with the aid of Project Navigator, working on a small project by yourself without project navigator and dealing with legacy drawings that only have basic AutoCAD linework in it. We'll look at these different situations in a second.

There are obvious things you can do with spaces. Depending on which release you are using these include Area Evaluation, Room tags, Scheduling and Display Themes are some basic ones. What are the benefits of using spaces? Well, it allows you to enter information once and display it in many different places. Think about the different places information about a room appear - tags for the floor plan, enlarged floor plan, schedule tables, door numbers, etc. Those are the most obvious advantages since they are easily accomplished. Anything else you take advantage of are simply added benefits.

Legacy AutoCAD Linework
Don't let this stop you from using spaces. You can still create spaces from the lines, arcs, circles and polylines that you've created. Just set your filter to lines, arcs, circles and polylines when using the space auto-generate tool. Then use the spaces to generate tags and schedules like you're used to. There is no limit to what you can do with the space objects just because you have spaces in a drawing with AutoCAD lines only.

ADT Project without Project Navigator
Just like the above situation, you can still use spaces to achieve your same results.

ADT Project with Project Navigator
This is perhaps the ideal situation since space objects can be tied in with project data such as the level of the building. This helps greatly in numbering the rooms since they will always be referenced to the level they live in. This in turn helps with tagging the doors since they can be tied to the room number which is tied to the floor number.

Hopefully this info will help motivate you to start using spaces if you are not already! Rumor has it that there is a plugin for spaces in 2007 that you can download if you are on subscription for added functionality. Stay tuned for another post on what that entails!