window glazing surface in window schedule....any schedule?

[Jefferson]

Our building officials have finally adopted energy standards requiring wall surface vs. glazing surfaces and subsequent percentages. So I am trying in vein to find the path to these answers in AC scheduling and it is completely illuding me.......

Is there a way to get my window glazing surface to appear in my window schedule? I can't even make it come up in the dialog box........!

I could swear I've seen this before. I know how to manually generate this, with area fills etc. & subtraction, but seems that AC knows this information and there is a way, or should be, to generate and display it for me........if only I can figure out how to ask.

And although I want to understand how to create these and manipulate them, I'm not above asking for cheat sheets, as in someone's .xml file of a schedule that already does this, hint.......

Any and all assistance would/will be greatly appreciated........

[Steve Jepson]

Jefferson wrote:
and here's why............AC is telling us that windows have no glazing area. I beleive if this information could be "updated" or calculated it then shows up in the schedule

Actually, what your seeing there is the place you would enter the total area of the glass manually so it will show up in the schedule when you use the first parameter I posted. It's not much good unless your saving that window to use as a Favorite.

[Jefferson]

Right Steve, but manual entry is exactly what I'm tryting to avoid! Otherwise just do the cover fill with holes routine, once per wall and you're done. If I have to manually enter each window's area, well........

[Steve Jepson]

So it looks like we will need to be adding wall surface areas to the window schedule too. And here is another schedule we will need soon.
Total area of Daylighting zones.

The daylighting zone width is assumed to be the width of the window plus either two feet on each side (the distance to an opaque partition) or one-half the distance to adjacent overhead or vertical glazing, whichever is least.

[Jefferson]

Coming to better defined understanding of what my local building authority requires I have a new process to extract and publish that information..........derived from the model as much as possible.

Window glazing surface is considered the area of the entire unit........this negates my original request, [based on information from previously mentioned building officials], for specific glazing surface. I simply added that parameter to my window schedule and rearranged it. That total area is then calculated as what percentage of the conditioned, [heated], floor space area. All pretty straight forward..........it unfortunately, we, [or I...?], can't complete all of these tasks inside ArchiCAD.

So my window schedule is exported as an Excel file. Then fields are added to total window area, unwanted fields removed, the floor surface is added, and finally a formula is included to determine the percentage of window area to floor space. A requirement to determine which type of prescriptive method your structure qualifies for. Finally it's "prettied up" to appear consistent with the rest of my published schedules, saved as a PDF and placed in layout. [see attachment]

Sadly, as discussed in places I searched in this forum, the AC schedule does not, [to my knowledge and boy please set me straight if I have this wrong!!], have the ability to run basic calculations .........like total columns, or run some percentages within a schedule.......how much do we miss the now extinct OLE!

So now a I have template Excel file with formulas and format ready to insert similar information from future projects into, to go through this whole process over again. How wonderful it would be to have some replacement work-around like OLE or either:

1] a schedule that could run calculations. [Is this a GDL possibility?]............eliminating the need to export, import, import and then keep MANUALLY updated! I find reliance on manual updating anything a dangerous precedent, mistakes, big ones sometimes can be or are made this way!

2] alternately, find a way to "hotlink" my PDF files from their source Excel.

With PDFs as preferred external file format for placement on documents in AC the quest now is for a way to auto-update those placed PDF files from Excel. It was discussed but not quite resolved here:
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=169276&highlight=excel+schedule#169276

If there's any a way to achieve this it would be great to know about it..........for everyone I would think.

[Ernest Atanasiu]

you have spoken my thoughts exactly.