Libraries & An Office Standard

[Anonymous]

Hi Guys!

I have been trying to get our office to a point where loading libraries is easy, painless, standard, and involves almost zero brain activity.

This was my thought-

Each project should need and load only three libraries.
1. ArchiCAD Object Library
2. Project Library
3. Office Library ( Alll our other office standard library parts and textures)

So we do this and it is fine, but, not.
Our libraries all end up seperating out of the folders they belong in when we re-open projects or when they are opened on another computer, or sent through to our other office.

Our "Office Library" holds a couple folders for instance- Garden, Textures, Furnishings, Stairs, Electric Symbols

I find all the folders with in this folder listed seperately in my Library manager.
I also find all the objects held in our Project libraries listed seperately under "Other Objects"

So, do you guys know how I can keep these in there specific folders so people aren't confused when they open a project.
And does this seem like a logical way to do this?
And would some of this be easier done with the Conatiners, or make new container option I see under the file menu?
And what are these containers, and what do I do with them?

THANKS!

[Link]

This is a very typical approach, but it depends where you are loading them from and how. IMHO you shoul load the AC Library locally and then load the others from your server (assuming you have one).

No matter where you open the project from, AC will look at the path from where the libraries were last loaded. So these paths need to be identical on each computer. This isn't much of a problem on the server, but locally the library must be located in exactly the same place on each. This isn't usually a problem if you leave the AC library where it is stored by the installation process. Although AFAIR, Macs needed to have the same hard drive names. Maybe that's not the case anymore?

As for container files, this is unneccesary unless your library is huge. What's more of a concern is that your objects are coming in under the blue 'Other Objects' folder. You should be loading the whole library folder, that contains all other subfolders (if any) and the library parts contained therein.

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Link wrote:
What's more of a concern is that your objects are coming in under the blue 'Other Objects' folder. You should be loading the whole library folder, that contains all other subfolders (if any) and the library parts contained therein.

Cheers,
Link.

I guess this is my concern as well- because I AM loading the library folder as a whole, and archi cad is seperating the parts out into the Other Objects, while also leaving my Project Library folder loaded under Libraries......

[Link]

Have you tried removing all libraries and parts and then reloading just the 3 libraries?

Cheers,
Link.

[David Larrew]

I assume that you are starting each new project from a template (.TPL) file? The template file helps you to control consistency (including Libraries) between all projects in the office.

The only thing that you need to be aware of is that you would need to manually load the "project specific" Library at the start of a new project.

As Link suggested, to get a "clean" Library load in an already messed-up project, you need to "Remove" all Libraries/Parts then "Add" the desired ones back.

[Anonymous]

Jesikuh123 wrote:

I guess this is my concern as well- because I AM loading the library folder as a whole, and archi cad is seperating the parts out into the Other Objects, while also leaving my Project Library folder loaded under Libraries......

Not quite sure if this relates... but ArchiCAD will automatically load newly created objects as 'other objects' so they are available for use without having to reloaded all libraries. If the objects are being saved into the project library as they should be then you can simply clean out all 'other objects' occasionally.