Archive for Reports

What’s My Favorite New Feature of 2009?

Overall, I’m a fan of 2009. A really big fan. It’s ugly, but I think James already discussed that at length. But there are two features of the new release that I hold very near and dear to my heart – want to find out more? Follow the link…

Read more

Get Stripped

No, this isn’t some kind of weird SPAM post or hack or anything. This is, in fact, a genuine Civil 3D article. Actually, it’s a little pun regarding the upcoming Autodesk University in Las Vegas. You know…The Strip. I had to throw in the obvious definition for Jason’s sake 🙂

I’ve been plagued recently with people asking how to calculate stripping using a corridor. They know the old standby method, you know the one; copy your OG surface and drop it by the depth of material to be stripped and then calculate cut and fill to this new surface. It works, but this way is cooler.

Let’s see how we can handle stripping in a corridor, shall we?

Read more

Automatic Legal Descriptions Using Civil 3D Parcels

Today’s review has been a long time coming – I haven’t been putting it off for any particular reason, I just haven’t gotten around to it until now.    But here it is, my review of Q-Legal from Bud Miller of BudCAD.  My most sincere apologies to Bud, since this has been in my inbox since April 25 of this year.    But I promised I’d get to it, and here it is – follow the link to see what this software can do for you.

Read more

Writing VBA Reports to MS Excel or Word

Every so often, I get an email from Autodesk TechNews – it’s called TechFAQ. I get it for Mechanical, Architectural, Civil, and Platform (that’s plain-jane AutoCAD for anyone who didn’t know) technologies. I promptly delete all but the Civil TechFAQ’s and then browse to see if there’s something in there that would be useful to me. Typically, it’s mostly old news, but one that I received about a week ago made me think. So, I’m filing it here – mainly for my own documentation, but hopefully someone else will get some use out of it.

So, how many of you use the reporting feature inside the Toolbox in Civil 3D? As you probably have seen, there are two types of reports – VBA and XML. Both reports open in Internet Explorer. And, if you’re like me, you have to tell IE that yes, this is trusted data before it will display. I often get asked “Why IE? Why not Word (or Excel?)” I typically tell people to just copy and paste, but here’s an easier solution. NOTE: This is only for VBA reports, not XML reports. Don’t ask me how to change the display feature of XML reports, ’cause I don’t know…

Click more to find out how it’s done.

Read more