I’m new to the Rockpile community. I’m looking at some of the offerings and I think that the Define Extra Stations macro is really going to help my office. We create a lot of TBC corridors for Survey Road Layout, grade verification and providing AMG related data to our contractors and like to use Tables in our corridors. A problem we’ve had for years is that many of the tabled stations don’t get exported into the .rxl file for the field crews, and the resultant file is incorrect. Our solution has been to add reference templates at critical stations in the corridor. This does make for a really crowded template list at times. It looks like this macro will help us solve the problem in a more elegant way.
One improvement I might ask about is if we can populate the extra station list using an ASCII file and/or populate/edit the list similar to the the Edit Alignment macro we use for alignments and shareable slope tables.
I’m looking forward to seeing what other TML product are helpful to us and may be interested in having some custom solutions developed for my agency, if I can get the right people interested in supporting it.
Dave
I have added the update to Define Extra Stations to allow copy and paste from Excel into the Table like we do in other areas of our tools. The developers think that is a couple of hours max work to address so when they get a break in other work we will try to slot in that fix. If you wanted to purchase our All Tools toolbox, I will escalate that fix to the top of the priorities to get it done for you.
Let us know what you need
Alan
Thanks for the quick response, Alan.
I work for a large state DOT so nothing happens fast!
We’re at the end of the Fiscal Year and I plan to request the Rockpile Macros out of our Office Expenses next FY and would expect the money to be released around October.
Since TML was opened up I’ve been trying to gain traction on paying someone to write macros for us. It doesn’t make sense to try to learn it myself. I already have more to do than I have time for. Hopefully we can get something started. I’m going to really start working on our headquarters to see if we can put a statewide survey group together to formulate a plan for what macros we need to simplify both our workflows and provide some QC on our work for both in house users and consultants. If we get that done we’ll have to figure out how to contract out that work, whether it is through a dealer or some other way, I don’t know.
Some of the ones you offer now will be of benefit, but the real power will come in having ones that are custom tailored to our workflows to work with our FXL and specific deliverables.
We have done work for Montana DOT if you need a reference. We have started some work with a few others - still at a low level. We can work directly with your DOT or through a dealer whatever suits. We try to develop tools that will benefit as many of our users as possible but do take on some custom work, the evaluation of what we take on is based purely on financial terms as we are not an hourly rate software developer that can work on a cost plus basis. Developing software is not as simple or “low cost” as people think it might be and we are a small “start up” that is trying to carve a space for ourselves. The team is flexible and extremely knowledgeable, very capable and open to requests / ideas etc. but they have to take us in the right direction.
We will do what we can to help and will for sure review any requests that you have as a DOT
Alan