I recently got an email from an ArchSmarter reader who needed help automating a tedious task.
He’s a plumbing engineer and he needs to number his pipes sequentially in his projects. This isn’t a big deal if you only have to number a couple dozen pipes.
But he regularly has to number hundreds of pipes. And he does it manually. Ugh. . .
The way he does this now is to create a pipe schedule then filter the schedule by pipe type. He then sorts the schedule by diameter and groups the pipes by length.
The schedule looks like this:
Pipes that have the same diameter and length get grouped together and end up with the same TPI number.
Now, setting up the schedule is the easy part.
Once that’s done, the boring work begins. To number the pipes, our intrepid plumbing engineer manually enters the numbers in the TPI field.
That’s a lot of tedious data entry.
So, he emails me to see if there’s a way to automatically number the pipes.
Turns out there is. You can automatically number the pipes…