Appendix B. Frequently Asked Questions

By default, tabs are set to automatically hide any column that does not contain any valid data for any of the templates being displayed – this is done to avoid unneeded clutter and is particularly useful for internal gains and air exchanges (e.g. if no template in your model contains more than three gains, the columns relating to gains 4 through to 10 are automatically hidden). However, you can turn off the auto-hiding behaviour by un-ticking the Automatically Hide Unused Columns item in the Tabular BTM Tab menu or by right-clicking on the tab and selecting the equivalent item from the pop-up menu – this will make all columns always visible in that tab.

 

The Tabular BTM’s exporting feature works from either the currently active tab or from all tabs in the currently active group. Therefore, it is your responsibility to ensure that you select the appropriate templates you want to export, and that your current tab/tab group set-up features all the columns you require. Also, be aware that the Export items on the side panel and in the File menu will export the columns from all tabs in the group, whereas the Copy All Data From Current Tab option in the Edit menu will only export the columns in the currently active tab.

 

In order for the import process to apply changes, the templates referenced in the data you are importing must exist in the current model. Any templates that do not exist will be ignored and any modifications you have made will not be applied.

You must also ensure that you do not modify the Template Handle values in the data, as this could also cause templates to be skipped.

Finally, ensure that all column header text remains unchanged and is included as the first line in the data you are importing – failure to do this will result in no modifications being made to your template attributes, as the Tabular BTM cannot identify the different columns in the input data.

 

There are two possible causes of this message:

          

This message means that the Tabular BTM was unable to identify the Template Handle column in the import data (left hand message) or was unable to identify any recognized columns in the import data (right hand message). Without the Template Handle column, it is not possible to perform an import, as there is no way for the Tabular BTM to determine what templates the values should apply to. When preparing the data for import, you must ensure that it includes the Template Handle column, with a valid handle for each template.

Some examples of valid and invalid input (viewed within Microsoft Excel prior to copying to the clipboard or saved to a tab-delimited file) are given below:

 

Valid Data for Input:

Missing Column Headers:

Missing Template Handle Column:

 

The intention of the export functionality in Tabular BTM is to allow you to make use of external tools such as Microsoft Excel for editing template attributes – thus, the tool is designed with the intention of the user exporting data from a model, making appropriate modifications and then importing the modified data back to the same model.

It is not intended to be used to transfer information between different models – there are two main reasons behind this:

-          Template handles may not be consistent between different models, and the export/import functionality relies on consistent handles in order to apply changes.

-          No true model data is exported. Notably, there is no geometry information, templates, Apache systems or profiles included in the data. Therefore, there is no mechanism to correctly apply the attributes to a different model.

For this reason, you should never attempt to import data from one model into another.