This TRACE 700 lesson shows the potential of combining files, alternatives, or importing alternatives in Trace 700.
In this example, we're going to go through how to create a new file based on an existing file. When we open trace, we want to hit the close button, as we need to go to the file menu, select new, and select new file based on. You can also hit control b to start this process. Once we select new file based on, we will be prompted with a window to open a project.
Right here, it is tempting to select the file that we're going to create a new file based on. However, if you do that, you're probably going to erase that new file because we're actually saving the new project. So we want to give it a new name. If we called it ‘Exercise One,’ for instance, we would be saving exercise one, and we would be replacing the existing file, therefore destroying it. Remember, give it a new name here. I’m going to call it ‘New file based on.’ Select open. Once we have saved the new file, we will see if there’s the new file listed in the menu new file based on, and now we can select the file or files that we're going to base this file on. In this case, we're going to select exercises one and two. So we select exercise one, hold the control key, and select exercise two. Now click open.
If you select more than one file it will prompt you, ‘Multiple files have been selected. Do you wish to merge the plants?’ In other words, if the files have plants that have the same name and structures, they're only going to be counted once. For instance, in exercise one and exercise two we have an air cooled chiller plant. If we selected no, the new file would have two air cooled chiller plants. But we’ll select yes, and it will merge the plants.
Once we select yes, we're going to be prompted to select the alternative, noting we can only bring one alternative per file. In this case, we only have one alternative, so it's simple.After selecting the alternative from the first file, click okay. And then we’ll select the alternative from the second file, and click okay again. TRACE 700 will run through the process and tell you that the file transfer is finished. Note, we had 10 rooms in exercise one, and 13 in exercise two. However, since the plants were the same, we have the same number of plants when we merged them. If we look at the rooms, it tells us which rooms came from the second file, and which rooms came from the first file. It does the same with systems.
Now having merged the plants, but not merging the systems, we need to reassign some coils. In this case it is simple. If we take a look at the plants, we will notice that there’s still one air cooled chiller like we said, and the heating plants are identical. The only difference is that the plants have a prefix of two on the front to indicate that they were brought in from the second file. Or more appropriately, merged from the second file.
As you can tell, there isn’t much to creating a new file based on. Make sure you remember when you select new file based on is to make sure you enter a new file name. It’s a common error for new users. So a new file based on will solve the problem when you have say alternatives two, three, or four, and you need to make it into alternative one. Or, when you have multiple buildings and you need to put them on one plant.
What happens if you want to compare two buildings and they're in separate files? While it's not documented in TRACE 700, the way to bring in a new file is to hit control alt b, and you can select an alternative from another file which we’ll do now. We hit control plus alt plus b. In this case, it takes us straight to based on what file.
So we can select multiple files. In this case, we’ll just select exercise three, click open, and it will ask us which alternative, and we're going to select alternative one, and say okay. TRACE 700 will prompt us when the alternative has finished importing. And when we select okay, we’ll see that the rooms and systems have been imported. It's important to note that this process is not published because sometimes it can be a bit buggy. However, the bug is typically encountered when a user is importing alternative four. If you are importing alternatives two or alternatives three, there does not seem to be any problem.