Dermot

Just to clarify a few things since there were some conflicting recommendations here: You do not need to change any preferences to select a wall in a camera view. You can always use the tab key or "next" edit toolbar button to select the wall after you have selected the room. We do not recommend changing your preferences to select walls before rooms until you understand the difference between wall and room heights. It is a common mistake for new users to change wall heights when what they should really be doing is changing room heights. If you wish to change the material of a single wall going all the way from floor to ceiling, it is recommended that you change the material in the wall specification dialog. If the wall spans multiple rooms, or you only need a portion of the wall painted, you can use the wall break tool to split the wall vertically. If a wall is really going to be structurally different, you should change the wall type instead of changing the surface material. If you wish to have different materials on just a horizontal portion of a wall, then the recommended method is to use either wall coverings or pony walls. Pony walls work best if you are actually going to use different structures for the two walls such as having brick on the lower portion of a wall. Wall coverings work best when you want to have just a cosmetic change such as an area or border with wall paper.

Cabinet moldings are not dynamic defaults. This means that if you add or change any moldings in your cabinet defaults that it will not affect any cabinets that have already been placed. It should show up for any new cabinets that are placed though. If you need to change the moldings for any previously placed cabinets, you can group select them to add/change the molding. You could also delete the existing ones and place new ones.

Turn the layer off like Perry suggested.

You need to change the text style that is assigned to the "Cameras" layer.

"Still a lag for me." I was afraid of that. From what I have heard, no one else has been able to duplicate your exact problems yet. There is something very unique about your system or setup that is causing the slow down for you. The only thing I can suggest is working directly with our tech support team until we can properly diagnose the problem. We won't be able to make any fixes until we can figure out why it is slow for you.

The 17.2 update is now available. There were several performance improvements made that should make X7 faster then X6 in many cases. If you are still experiencing any slow performance problems with 17.2, please report them directly to our tech support team.

The 17.2 update is now available. You should contact support if you see any more problems where the layout does not update to match the plan view.

Chief does not generate the 3D data for the stringers unless the stair is marked as Open Risers. When the risers are closed, you normally can't see the stringers. The program has worked this way since the very beginning.

There should be a copy of the original X5 plan in your archive folder.

"...so I'll upload to support." Please be sure to upload the original X5 plan when you do. If you give us the plan after you save it in X7, we will not be able to determine if there is a problem with converting it. I really suspect that the plan is already in a bad state and if we open it up in X5 that it will look exactly the same as it does in X7.

What your saying does not make sense to me. All X5 plans should come into X7 with very few, if any, problems. These plans are only 2 versions back and I don't think there have been very many material changes since then. Even if you were using materials in your X5 plan that had custom textures and patterns, they should still be visible in X7 camera views and the worst case is that your custom textures are not there. The material should display as a solid color instead. I suspect that your plan is really messed up from something else. You may want to contact tech support or post your X5 plan to see if others get similar results if they open it up in X5.

Line weights and line styles are completely independent from colors in Chief. You could always create different layer sets so that you see the colors you want while editing and print with different colors for the final docs. You can also control how the "color off" works in your preferences. You can have images and pictures still show in color and/or have colors use grayscale instead of black and white.

There is no way to import or export your text styles by themselves. If you import/export any other object that references a text style, such as a layer set or annotation set, then the text style should go with it. If you have found a case where a referenced text style does not get transferred, then please report this to our tech support team so that we can look into it further. I suspect that when you imported/exported your layer sets and annotation sets that the program transferred only the text styles it needed but not all of the ones you had in the plan.

We have had several people report problems when trying to do a "save as" that we have tracked down to Dell's backup and recovery software. Jon posted this on another thread: If uninstalling this software does not solve your problem, then you will probably have to contact support on Monday.

Out testing team has been able to determine one cause of this problem. We think this is the case that most people are running into. We should have a fix for this in the 17.2 update that should be available some time in the near future.

Only if you think it is important. You could also email in your suggestion or even call tech support. I don't normally enter feature requests or bug reports based on random discussions on Chieftalk. I only read a small fraction of the posts on Chieftalk and comment on far fewer. There's just not enough time in the day for me to do more. Any time you see me posting something on Chieftalk, your first thought should be "Why is Dermot spending time on Chieftalk when he should be fixing bugs or adding new features?" Every once in a while, I see something on Chietalk that I think is really important and I will take the extra time needed to make sure it gets logged in our internal database. You should never count on that happening. If you think a feature is worth doing, then you should make a formal suggestion. If you think a bug is worth fixing, then you should make a formal bug report.

I was not trying to suggest that the current system is good enough that it does not need any improvements. I was only trying to explain how the current system works because it was obvious some people did not understand it. Understanding how it works should help you to use the program more effectively. If you have ideas for how you think it could be improved, then please feel free to send in your suggestions.

I don't think everyone understands how the allowed angles work in Chief. If you need to draw some walls at 22.5 degrees, then all you need to do is switch your allowed angles from 15 degrees to 7.5 degrees. You don't need to put in any additional angles. If you try to put in an additional angle of 22.5 degrees the program will give you a warning that this angle is already an existing allowed angle since it falls on the 7.5 degree increment. The additional allowed angles should only be used when you need to draw something at some really odd angle that is not on a 7.5 degree increment. For example, if you need to draw something at 9.5 degrees. Then you can enter an additional angle of 9.5. This will let you draw walls on 7.5 degree increments but it will also allow 9.5, 99.5, 189.5, and 279.5. You should use these additional allowed angles very rarely and you should not enter any unneeded ones because they may get in the way of drawing things at the angles you want.

I often go weeks without rebooting. The first time I see something strange though, the kind of thing that just should not happen, I reboot and many times the problem will magically go away.

Ryan posted this note in the other thread about X7 slowness: He was able to find a solution that we think will solve the major problems that Ken is seeing. This fix will be available with the 17.2 update that should be available some time in the near future. There have been lots of other random comments by lots of people on lots of threads though. Some of these don't appear to be related at all so I'm not sure if the update will solve all of these issues. If you are experiencing any problems with X7 (slowness, crashes, or any other undesirable behavior), then please contact our tech support team and work with them. Some of these problems may be plan or machine specific and tech support will need to gather all of the relevant info before we can properly identify the cause. Thank you for helping us find and fix these problems.

Never. Have you rebooted your machine recently?

The easiest way to edit wall framing is to open the wall detail. Also, you can rebuild wall framing for any wall at any time using the edit toolbar. And, I would recommend that you change your header specs in the door dialog (or door defaults if you want them all to be the same) rather then editing the framing directly. As for why you can't select the wall studs in plan view, I'm not sure why you are having a problem. Are you using the tab key to get the stud?

"Can you control the shutter width?" Of course you can. I would recommend that you spend a little more time learning Chief and a lot less time using Sketchup.

"...but on Mulled window I seem to be out of luck." Why? You can add shutters to mulled units. The arch can be a bit tricky. If you make the top window an arched window and then mull them, the mulled shutters will be rectangular instead of arched. If you make the top window rectangular and then make the mulled unit archted, the mulled unit will build the correct shape for the arch.

Chief's cabinets are setup so that they can only join one cabinet back to another cabinet back. If you have more then one cabinet against the back of a cabinet, you may get stray module lines because the program gets confused about which cabinet is connected to which other one. You can either display all module lines or use one of the many workarounds suggested here.