Materials List Revisited

[Ed_Downunder]

Hi Gerry I am very glad you contributed your comments, you are quite accurate in my view and doing an autopsy on your comments may inspire others to contribute - many thanks to you Lew.... A beginning approach would be to have user controlled categories. For exampled we all build from the foundation and have floors,walls, ceiling, roof etc. There are many other categories like electric, cabinets, plumbing. At the moment a complex wall reports to a Framing category. A Siding Category, A Wall-board category. A Insulation Category. The information comes from one place and is distributed. So we can see that is not complicated it is fragmented and confusing with no logical result. Changing a wall component say brick to masonry does nothing to help with the logic.

My starting point is a foundation. I would like my Foundation Category to report foundation footing as cubic meters with the associated rebar. Floor Category to report the 1st floor slab & mesh the second floor etc.. Wall as above, framing, sips, masonry, straw. Hard wall plaster, render, stucco, weather board....these are all wall components.. This would suit me and probably a percentage of users. If it were user definable it would suit 100% of users.

Chief uses promo videos and promotes the materials list as a feature? The materials list is stored in the Project Browser. The solution promoted is to export it to excel. That is not a solution, it may be an end result to take into final documentation or use for estimate vs actual but it is not a solution.

Schedule update in real time. is it possible that schedules are part of a solution. At present we select what information is available to the schedule. It would have to be a new schedule of course.

Just changing the logic will go a long way to making it usable. This should not be allowed 3 years of development to get it right. It needs an urgent fix right now and over time user will add some useful suggestions that will fine tune in the long run.