Attach an Existing Worksheet to a BOQ Item

In Work with BOQ Worksheets, the procedure for attaching a worksheet to a BOQ Item as described. The focus there was on creating a new worksheet and defining its resource components, as highlighted in Figure: Inserting Worksheet for Bill Item. Observant readers may have noticed that besides the option "Create & Insert Worksheet", two other options are available that focus on reusing existing worksheets. These are

  • "Insert selected", and

  • "Duplicate & Insert selected"

as shown in Figure: Reusing an Existing Worksheet.

Figure: Reusing an Existing Worksheet

In Figure: Reusing an Existing Worksheet, worksheets of the selected data source are displayed in the table. The Local Project is the default data source that is always available. However, additional data sources can be added to a project, as described below, after which their worksheets also become available for selection. After displaying the worksheets of the selected Data Source, a user can search for and select a worksheet to be attached to the item under consideration. Remembering that we are dealing with an existing worksheet, there are two ways in which it can be reused:

  • Insert Selected: If the structure of two or more worksheets is identical, it makes sense to share one and the same worksheet between the items. For such cases, the option "Insert Selected" is available to attach the worksheet to the bill item under consideration. Once a worksheet is attached to an item using this option, the net rate of the worksheet is immediately transferred to the item and appears in the BOQ. It should be noted that changing the content of a shared worksheet will impact the net rate of all bill items to which it was attached. However, if a worksheet has been inserted from a data source, changing the content will only impact the items it was attached to in the current project, and not in the data source, it was pulled from.

  • Duplicate and insert selected: If the structure of a worksheet is similar, but not identical to that of an existing worksheet, this option should be used. A duplicate copy of the selected worksheet is created, except that the new worksheet has a unique code and name, and is attached to the item under consideration. The information and calculations of the new worksheet can now be changed without affecting the original worksheet from which it was copied.