Alaskan_Son

Quite a few ways, but here's a pretty simple one: Drop a Room Finish Schedule into your plan, delete all the columns, add Area Interior and Area Standard. Set the schedule to Include Objects from All Floors and to Display Totals Row. This should give you 2 totals. Just manually subtract the one from the other.

CAD Detail is typically the way to go, BUT if you really want to put schedules in specific views (and there definitely are valid reasons to do so), all you have to do is put the schedule on a different layer and turn that layer off in other views... Also, just as a side-note, you should familiarize yourself with the Project Browser for quickly accessing your various views (specifically CAD Details in this example). I typically have my Project Browser tabbed along with Active Layer Display Options and the Library Browser...

A few solutions come to mind: 1. Create a special Layout Template specifically for these smaller schedules. It can even be nothing but a blank page with no borders or title block. Maybe only page numbers. 2. Just print directly from the Plan using the Print dialog. When doing this, I will typically zoom in so the desired area is centered onscreen, use "Chief Architect Save As PDF", and then adjust the Fit to Paper scale so that the preview shows it filling the page like I want. See response posted by@DBCooper below for a good way to set it up so you can more efficiently set the positioning, zoom, and scale by just printing from a CAD Detail (again this is still printing directly from the Plan). 3. Copy/Paste the Schedule to another program and print from there. This can be tricky though and may not be desirable since you'll lose any callout symbols or 3D views that may have been in your schedule. 4. Select the Schedule and click the Export Text tool to Export to another program. This has the same issues as Copy/Paste but also has a few benefits over the latter in the various export options.

A Plan Footprint is a special object type on Chief. If you're not familiar with it, search the Help files for Plan Footprint.

The Plan Footprint is controlled by the Layer Set being used in your CAD Detail, not the layer set used back in your Plan View.

We have handles for Leaders and for Callout Arrows but not for Section Arrows. A suggestion for the Callout Arrow to be used along with the Alt Key to pull a Section Arrow might be a good one.

I don't typically donate time to troubleshoot or advise on scripting issues on here anymore, but I decided to make a one time exception this morning: There are all sorts of little problems: source_information = %room.area.internal% numeric_part = source_information.match(/\d+/)[0] numeric_value = numeric_part.to_i result = numeric_value / 20 puts result 1. %room.area.internal% isn't a Ruby accessible object attribute (name:value pair). It's just a Chief Architect string substitution macro. If you want to use this macro in a text box placed in the room, the name:value pair you should be using is simply room.internal_area without the percentage signs. 2. The match method is a Ruby method used to parse a string. The internal area attribute however is not a string. Its a Measurement. If you want to use the match method, you first need to convert the source_information to a string using the .to_s method. 3. Just an observation, but you may not be getting the results you think. The .to_i method is converting your results to an integer which is the whole number rounded down. 0.999 would become zero, 559.9 becomes 559, etc. What's worse though is that because you're diving by another integer (20) the results of your calculation would also become another integer. So, instead of 559.9/20 = 27.995 you would get an even 27. This one can be solved by just converting to a float (which contains decimal values) and then rounding the result. This can be done a number of ways, but one of the easiest would simply be to replace .to_i with .to_f. 4. puts isn't used in Chief's text macro environment. It's simply not needed. If you try to use it, your results will by nil (empty). So, the corrected macro becomes: source_information = room.internal_area numeric_part = source_information.to_s.match(/\d+/)[0] numeric_value = numeric_part.to_f result = numeric_value / 20 result.round Although the above macro would work, it still has a handful of totally unnecessary code and could be reduced all the way down to: (room.internal_area.to_f/20).round

Are you sure you used the Hole in Ceiling Platform tool and not the Roof Hole or Hole in Roof / Custom Ceiling tool?

Have you looked at the Hole in Ceiling Platform tool to see if that does what you want?

To get additional items into the Material List, you need to use the Components tab.

What happened to... ??

Open the Garage and Porch Rooms up on Floor 1, click on the Structure tab, and under Floor, uncheck Build Foundation Below.

I think the answer to this depends a bit on HOW you are drawing up your site plan and on what needs to be shown on that plan. If its all CAD, then I would suggest you look into using the Plan Footprint tool in a CAD Detail. The Plan Footprint is essentially a layout-box-like viewport sent to a CAD Detail so that the house can be freely moved around on your site plan. If however you need to include a lot of 3D information, then that changes things a bit. I usually draw all that stuff in the current plan file and then if the house needs to move, just group select or Edit Area and move the underlying site plan stuff in relation to the house instead of the other way around.

Study the Materials List Polyline and its settings. Its a super powerful feature and is the best way to utilize the Materials List in my opinion. It can be used in concert with the various tools you already know about (Layer Sets, Layers, Material Definitions, Components, etc.) and you can even group select them to produce a single combined materials list using different polylines with different settings.