Rounding in Schedules- display correct totals

[tarrah]

We just realized that all of our area schedules round similar to excel, where there is a discrepancy of 1 or 2 sf between the "Grand Total" and the actual total of the individual line items in the schedule. While this may be inconsequential, we:

1. Dont want to look like idiots in front of the client
2. Want to have accurate numbers for costing/pricing sets that will go to banks etc.

I wrote this workaround for my office to use. It's a bit **simple** so that everyone can understand it, but here it is. The instructions were meant to be applied to all of the area schedules and room schedule in each project, where "Area" is a field already included in the schedule. The process ends up hiding this field and creating a new field that is based on an integer.

1. Edit Schedule and go to View Properties
2. Click on Fields
3. Click on Calculated Value and create a field for your schedule
• Name: DISPLAY AREA
• Discipline: Common
• Type: Integer
• Formula: Area/1sf (this formula can be more complicated if there are other factors)
4. Click on the Formatting Tab within the Schedule Properties dialog box.
5. Click on Area
• UNCHECK "Calculate Totals"
• CHECK "Hidden Field"
6. Click on DISPLAY AREA
• Heading: AREA (SF)
• Alignment: Right
• CHECK "Calculate Totals"
• UNCHECK "Hidden Field"
7. Click ok
8. If you have already done the layout for your project info sheet, you will probably have to adjust the extents of the schedule for graphic reasons.

Hope this helps!

[DaveP]

How many times must we go through this?
The total is not inaccurate! Since the Rooms are rounded, THEY are inaccurate.

The process described above does give you a nice, even round number but if as you say, you:
"Want to have accurate numbers for costing/pricing sets that will go to banks etc. ", you go through the process above to fudge the total.

You have now given a number to the bank that is WRONG. Nice and even, and if anyone bothers to add up the rooms, it might add up, but IT IS STILL WRONG!

Let's say you have 100 Rooms and the Area of each Room is 100.4 sqft.
Your Room Schedule shows 100 Rooms with an Area of 100 sqft. (Not 100.4, since you don't want to bother with those messy decimal places.)

Based on the "corrected" schedule, you're going to report to the bank that you are renting out 10,000 square feet, when in actuality, it is 10,040.
Ask the bank which one makes you look like an idiot.

[tomnewsom]

Quite. Nice round numbers are for people handwriting the answers for sums they did in their heads.

[ademox]

For metric users who wish to show some decimal places:

The procedure is basically the same but the formula is a little bit different, something like that:

Area Integer = (Area*100)/1 m² (Schedule field type is Integer)

As you make your area value to integer that means you have to secure your decimal places first. By multiplying your area by 100 you have two decimal places secured, 10 means one decimal place and so on.

The other formula is changing your units back to area values:

Rounded Area = (Area Integer)*0.01 (Schedule field type is Area)

NB! Unit is important. If you get Inconsistent Units error that means you get this wrong. If you try to eliminate the unit you must divide the unit by the same unit (example m²/m²=no unit). If you want the unit to reappear you must multiply the value with the unit. That's why you cannot have the second formula like this: (Area Integer)/100 m² which gives you the same number but the unit is actually 1/m², not m² and you get Inconsistent Units error.

And that's it. This rounded area field gives you nice inaccurate area values with your desired decimal places which should satisfy officials, customers or whoever who tend to recalculate your schedules only to find out that your grand total actually differs from the sum they got.