Best method to incorporate consultant drawings into Sheet Index?

[Anonymous]

Greetings - I was wondering if anyone could share how they incorporate consultant drawings into their sheet indexes? For example I have a structural engineer who has sent me 10 of his sheets in PDF format. I would like to include them in my Sheet Index. I can manually type them in a text block under the automated index on the actual sheet which is fine but then the counter on my sheets in the bottom right is incorrect. For instance on my architectural sheets it will only show my 30 sheets and not the 10 new sheets i.e. "1 of 30 sheets". However the total number of sheets is actually now 40 b/c of the 10 new consultants sheets. Just wondering how other people make this work and what is the smoothest way to keep track of consultant sheets and indexes. Thank you in advance for any tips/advice, much appreciated.

PS: Almost all of my consultants send their sheets in via PDF - I know how to reference a PDF and insert into one of my sheets but worried if I tried that method that would make the file size really large. Plus they usually send them to all as part of a single PDF not single PDF sheets.

[David Maudlin]

SJPHouse:

For adding MEP sheets to the Sheet Index, I just create blank layouts with the correct Layout ID and Name. If you want to add the content to each sheet, use the Drawing Tool to add the pdf file; when you do this you have to select an individual page from a multipage pdf file.

David

[Anonymous]

Thank you David. For some reason I was worried that referencing a lot of PDF’s would make my file size really large but so far this method works great. I’m curious, if you wanted to divide the sheet index into disciplines with headings i.e. Architectural Sheets, Electrical Sheets, etc. would you use the Subsets folder in the tree? I saw it done this way on a blog I found and it seemed effective, just not sure if that’s a work around or what Subset folders were actually intended for? Thank you.

[David Maudlin]

SJPHouse wrote:
I’m curious, if you wanted to divide the sheet index into disciplines with headings i.e. Architectural Sheets, Electrical Sheets, etc. would you use the Subsets folder in the tree? I saw it done this way on a blog I found and it seemed effective, just not sure if that’s a work around or what Subset folders were actually intended for?

I don't have experience with this, perhaps someone else will be able to answer.

David

[Eduardo Rolon]

SJPHouse wrote:
Thank you David. For some reason I was worried that referencing a lot of PDF’s would make my file size really large but so far this method works great. I’m curious, if you wanted to divide the sheet index into disciplines with headings i.e. Architectural Sheets, Electrical Sheets, etc. would you use the Subsets folder in the tree? I saw it done this way on a blog I found and it seemed effective, just not sure if that’s a work around or what Subset folders were actually intended for? Thank you.

That is the trick, though there is a Bug in AC22 that will sort them incorrectly. Also for complex projects you might want to split the Indexes by consultant.

[Erwin Edel]

You can also use Layout Info Scheme to add fields that can be used for sorting indexes.

We use 'Status' (think that's a default one) to sort ours. Haven't installed 22 yet, so uncertain if that bugs out.

You can also add fields for change dates, sheet size, etc that are a bit wonky when using the defaults for them.