Limiting Site Schedules (Including the Reference Notes Schedule) Using Work Areas

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Power Tip: Work Areas

• Work Areas and Site Schedules: Overview
• Limiting Site Schedules to One or All Work Areas
• Creating a Site Schedule Organized by Some, but Not All, Work Areas
• Work Areas and Site Hatches
• Editing a Work Area Name to Change a Schedule Title
• Nested Work Areas (Work Areas Within Work Areas)
• Related Webinars
• Troubleshooting

In some cases, you may want to run a site schedule for only a portion of your drawing. Creating Work Areas allows you to generate a schedule for items contained in one or more Work Areas. You can limit a number of site-related schedules using Work Areas, including:

To learn more about creating Work Areas in your drawing, visit our Work Areas documentation page.

In response to client requests, we've added the ability to create nested Work Areas – that is, Work Areas within Work Areas. RefNotes Schedules and other site schedules will now recognize objects within these nested Work Areas.

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Power Tip: Advanced Work Areas

A Work Area is essentially a "drawing within a drawing" surrounded by a visible border. You can select a Work Area and perform specific functions on only that Work Area, rather than on the entire drawing. You can also create an irrigation schedule for several, or all, Work Areas in your drawing.

This feature can be especially valuable when you generate an irrigation schedule. Work Areas allow you to run separate schedules for:

• A specific portion or phase of the project

• Off-site and on-site improvement

• Scope-of-work requirements (for example, certain areas designated as containing tenant improvements, other areas under a general contract, etc.)

Work Areas are drawn with a non-plot line, and the line color from one to another will vary slightly to distinguish them from one another.

A Work Area will appear on a single layer of your drawing. Once you are ready to run schedules for your entire site, you can simply Freeze each Work Area's layer. The schedule will not consider the Work Areas that are frozen.

You may choose to create Work Areas before you begin your design. These Work Areas will provide pre-defined regions or divisions within your drawing, such as back and front yard areas, or project phases. When you are ready to create your separate site schedules, you can simply select the area or areas to include in each schedule.

Of course, you won't always know which parts of your site design you will need to include in a schedule until after you have started – or even completed – your drawing. In these cases, you can also create a Work Area of an existing portion of your drawing. You can then run a schedule for only items included in that area.

Limiting Site Schedules to One or All Work Areas

Once you've created separate Work Areas for different portions of your design that contain different site items, you can easily generate a separate schedule for each Work Area, or one schedule showing all Work Areas.

If you generate any of the site schedules for a drawing with multiple Work Areas, the cursor will turn into a pickbox and the CAD Command line will prompt you to:

Select Work Area or <All>.

You have two choices at this point:

• Select Work Area: Use your pickbox to select one Work Area and, as a result, create a schedule reflecting only the contents of that Work Area.
• <All>: Press Enter or right-click to produce a schedule for all Work Areas in the drawing.

Click the bounding line of a Work Area to select that Work Area. The Command line will prompt:

Upper left corner.

Click the location where you want to place the upper left corner of the schedule. Depending on which site schedule you are creating, a schedule listing only the site items (such as Reference Notes, Site Development Areas, etc.) in the selected Work Area will appear in that location.

Creating a Site Schedule Organized by Some, but Not All, Work Areas

Want to include more than one, but not all, Work Areas from your plan in a site schedule? Follow our instructions to run a single schedule categorized by Work Area.

Work Areas and Site Hatches

Our software does not allow you to split a single hatch between multiple Work Areas. Splitting hatches in this way is not possible for a number of reasons – primarily because the only way to do so is to convert every hatch to a Region object, and then perform a Union and Subtraction against the Work Area in order to determine the area inside vs. outside the hatch.

This process can misfire because not all hatches can be converted to Region objects. Allowing splitting of hatches would require the software to highlight those areas in some fashion to alert users to them. But more importantly, that process of converting to Regions and Union/Subtracting takes time. For a complicated design with hundreds of areas could easily chug the computer for a number of minutes. While of course some users would be willing to accept that hit, we feel it's a bit beyond the acceptable range of about 7 seconds for the computer to finish doing whatever it was doing.

Even more importantly, splitting jobs into zones or phases typically coincides with a desire to turn off or half-tone the objects outside of the current viewport. In order to do this, you would need to draw the hatch as two separate hatches.

But after all of that explanation, we do believe that the ability to split hatches between Work Areas would be a handy feature to include in the software! In the future, as the Region functions become more reliable and a bit quicker, we will certainly be adding this functionality.

Work Areas in Xrefs

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Power Tip: Work Areas In Xrefs

Our software now recognizes Work Areas within Xrefs. That means you can run a schedule that includes plants, irrigation equipment, or site amenities within Work Areas that exist in files you've attached to the main drawing. When you go to generate your schedule, you can simply select individual Work Areas in your Xrefs as if they are in the current drawing. If you select All Work Areas, Land F/X objects within Work Areas in your Xrefs will be included in the schedule as if those Work Areas were in the main drawing.

For more information and specific instructions, see our Work Areas in Xrefs page.

Nested Work Areas

In response to client requests, we've added the ability to create nested Work Areas – that is, Work Areas within Work Areas. Our schedule tools (Plant Schedule, Irrigation Schedule, Reference Notes Schedules, etc.) will now recognize objects within these nested Work Areas. More information

Related Webinars

• Using Work Areas: Work Areas provide a perfect way to organize your schedules, scales, layers, and User Coordination Systems (UCSs). Whether you need to separate out phases in your schedules or show an area at a different scale and viewing angle, you need to know how to manipulate a Work Area. (1 hr 2 min)
• Ask Us Anything! Spotlight on RefNote Schedules: Join us to see the unveiling of our revamped RefNotes Schedule and hear about our development intention. (54 min)
• Common Land F/X Questions: This webinar covers some of our lesser-known tools, including Work Areas. (1 hr)

Troubleshooting

General Work Area troubleshooting

Issue: Your site schedule is not recognizing a Work Area, or is showing all site items in the drawing except those in a specific Work Area

Issue: The schedule tool is not giving you the option to select your entire drawing. It is only allowing you to run a schedule for one or more Work Areas.

Issue: Work Areas are not recognizing or calculating a hatch

Issue: You are unable to create or place a Work Area

Issue: A Notation Reference Note is not showing up in a Reference Note Schedule that references a specific Work Area

Issue: "Cannot find Work Area title" error message when placing a schedule in a drawing with Work Areas

Issue: You tried to create a site schedule for a Work Area in your drawing, but the schedule did not appear when you tried to place it