Using the Area tab in an Estimate

With Ediphi, estimates are driven by parametric design data (Area Sheets), tied to dynamic formulas that don’t break like Excel. Because we know your project area (ex. number of floors, perimeter, floor to ceiling height), we can populate chunkable units of scope (ex. unit mix, systems), which Ediphi calls "estimating components", within the constraints of your building’s geometry.

This allows you to save time during the collaborative design process, and prevents you from making costly mistakes when manually entering quantities. Users can leverage Ediphi’s area sheets to quickly adapt to design changes. For example, adding a floor or changing the floor height will automatically refactor your entire estimate—across all of your estimating components.

In this article, we’ll be reviewing the basic functionality of the Area tab in Ediphi. Head to the navigation bar on the left of your screen, then select Estimate, then Area Sheet. Once in there, you’ll notice the area sheet, and a number of tabs to the right like Active Floor, Façade, Structure, and Vertical Transportation.

For basic usage, the places where you want to pay attention to are the options within the area sheet like Below Grade, Above Grade, and Features, where you can start to define the different aspects of your building; whether it has below grade floors, or above grade floors, or features like soffits or other structures. 

The other place to pay attention is in Façade. Every floor that you takeoff will have a Perimeter, and a Floor to Floor, which will give us our Gross Façade and help us when we’re calculating different aspects of the building later on. 

The next step would be to go to our takeoff to get the numbers needed to input into the area sheet. For this example, we have already done the takeoff and collected the area and perimeter for our Use Group: We have a gross area of 20,000 sq ft. and a total linear footage of perimeter of 1,000 lf. We’ll assume that for this example, there’s a floor to floor of 15 ft in this building. We’re going to want to do this for every floor in our project where this use group applies, and take these numbers and plug them into our area sheet.

In Ediphi, there is a feature where if you select a box or cell, a square appears in the corner of the box. If we want to copy a value to other floors, for example in Apartments, we can grab the corner of that box and drag it down, and this will copy whatever is in this field to wherever we drag it to:

In addition to dragging down you can also copy and paste by hitting Ctrl C + Ctrl V on your keyboard, as if you were in Excel. Once we’re done adding all the values from our takeoff, our area sheet should look like this:

A couple more things to note:

• The Active Floor tab allows you to select or unselect any below grade, above grade, or features as active floors.
• The Structure tab allows you to input the Gross Structure of each floor, if applicable.
• The Vertical Transportation tab allows you to add any form of vertical transportation like stairs, elevators, or escalators to your area sheet.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact our support team and we’ll be happy to help!