ArchiCAD Summer School: Half Plenary: The ArchiCAD Office

Outline of Andreas Lettner's half plenary :The ArchiCAD in the Small Office - Organising Practice standards, master layouts, templates and libraries, DWG/DXF interchange, for efficient use of ArchiCAD in the small office.

Introduction
Normally there is no defined CAD manager in the small office, although this is a matter of course in midrange and bigger companies. A designer (without advanced IT skills) finds themselves operating as CAD manager by default.
Designers in the small office are confronted with a number of severe undesirable difficulties like :

• Loss of time and quality
• No or problematical communication between planning partners and
  ArchiCAD operatives
• Wrong or erroneous data exchange
• Bad structured project files
• Unnecessary double drawing and loss of data

Let's call this phenomenon cad + chaos.... I'll show some real bad examples just to analyze:

• The folder mess
• The file mess
• The library mess
• The layer mess
• The attribute mess
• Common problems of collaboration