Reading and editing how an item turns what you drew into what it reports.
Every item shows its conversion as a formula rather than a single opaque number, so you can see what a quantity is made of and change one part of it without unpicking the rest.
A concrete one, for an area item reporting cubic yards at 8 inches with 10% waste:
b × 8 in ÷ 27 + 10%
| Token | Means |
|---|---|
b | The base measurement - what you actually drew. |
× 8 in | A dimension or rate you supplied. Each one multiplies. |
÷ 27 | The unit conversion. Shown as ÷ N where that is clean, otherwise × f. |
( ) | Grouping, when there are two or more inputs. |
+ 10% | Waste. |
Open the fx panel on the item. The input tokens are editable in place: click 8 in, type a new
depth, and the quantity updates. Waste is its own token, so adding 10% never means recomputing a
factor by hand.
The read-only formula in the grid cell and the editable one in the fx panel are built from the same tokens, so the two can never show different things.
The tokens are what you typed, not rounded arithmetic. The reported quantity is computed from
the stored values, never by multiplying the numbers shown. A formula that reads × 0.33 has not
lost precision - the display is short, the maths is not.
A single number in a Multiplier column would produce the same answer and tell you nothing. Six
months on, × 0.0247 is unreadable and unverifiable, where b × 8 in ÷ 27 says what it is and can
be checked against the detail it came from. It is also what makes the depth editable as a depth
rather than as an arithmetic consequence.