USING INTEGERS

FOR TRICKY
TITLEBLOCKS
Have you ever come across a project with a keyplan in the titleblock and wondered how to go about managing
the keyplan shading? The last thing you want to be doing is clicking every single check box across hundreds of
drawings.

In this jumbled mess there are a total of 14 shaded areas on the keyplan. 3 for the basement, 3 for the roof and
8 for ground and first floor. So what is the most efficient way to manage it all?

The answer is integers.

An integer is simply a number that is not a fraction. It is a whole number. In the instance of our keyplan,
integers can be used to control the shading for our titleblock by associating those values with an on/of visibility
parameter.

In this example, I have used the following number sequences

Basement = 1 3 (you could use negatives here)

Ground & first floors = 21 28
Roof = 31 33
Each of the visibility parameters are then associated with the integer value by simply using the
formula KEYPLAN_INT = x where x is the value associated with each level and zone. So for
example, KEYPLAN_INT = 24 looks like this

But we dont have to stop there. You would have notice we have two wings on the project that has resulted in
the drawings being rotated at 10 degrees, this means on those 3 zones our north point will be different to the
rest of the project. We can again use our integer parameter to solve this.

As these rotated views are only on ground and first floor, they are associated with the codes 25, 26 and 27, this
means we can control our north point rotation with an and formula nested inside an ifformula. The formula that
Ive used is if(and(KEYPLAN_INT > 24, KEYPLAN_INT < 28), 3.091, 13.091) so any drawings that have a
keyplan integer of greater than 24 and less than 28 will have the north point rotated at 13.091 from north, the
remaining drawings will have their north points rotated at 3.091 degrees.
But what about the drawings that we dont want a northpoint, or a keyplan for that matter? Drawings like
schematics, details and drawing lists. The shaded parts of the keyplan already only display if the correct code
is used, so we can take advantage of this and simply create another visibility parameter that is associated with
the building outline, the additional border line on the titleblock and the north point. In my example Ive named
this parameter NO_KEYPLAN with the formula of not(KEYPLAN_INT = 0). When the integer = 0, everything
is switched off.
If you have people that dont know how to read hydraulics drawings (Im looking at you Sydney), you can also
associate this parameter with Stratman and his sweet 70s style.

So on the left we have an integer value of 24 and on the right, the same titleblock with an integer value of 0.
You can then use your favourite bi-directional Excel option, be it Dynamo, BIMLink or some other alternative,
export all the data to excel, set the integers for each sheet, re-import the data and youre done.