What are Issue and Revision dates and what are they used for?
Issue and revision dates are used in projects when delivering documents to clients and stakeholders. Project and spec revision dates are used to track the day documents were delivered and highlight what spec updates were made. You can manage revision dates from the Revisions & Submissions tab within the Project Workspace.
Project revision dates can be used to highlight changes that have been made to specifications since they were first delivered. If a specification was created any time before the last revision date (i.e., it has been delivered), then any changes to the specification will be highlighted in red on reports. You can disable revision highlighting using a filter option under settings, before generating the report.
How to Set up an Issue & Revision date within a project
Go to the grey ‘Projects tab’ on the left you will see additional tabs, the ‘Revisions & Submissions’ tab is where you will add the dates.
When adding first date to add to a project, click on the + Add Date button, a window will pop up for you to make a date type selection.
All Spec Types
We recommend choosing the default, ‘All Spec Types’ so that dates can be assigned to all specs without having a furnished/installed by classification, this provides more flexibility to assign dates to specs that have been assigned the ‘Unspecified’ furnished installed by selection.
Specification Types (furnished/Installed by)
If you would like to have your issue and revision dates associated with the ‘furnished installed by’ grouping, then add the first date by selecting one or multiple options.
This helps you tailor your reports for different audiences by determining which revision dates will show up on specification reports when the corresponding report filters (OFCI, CFCI etc.) are used. This also determines which specifications can be assigned the revision date, and which will have their changes tracked against the revision date.
For example, you may create a revision date for delivering only the CFCI and CFOI (contractor furnished) specifications to the contractors. When generating specification reports, you can then select CFCI and CFOI from the report filters, which will only show CFCI and CFOI specifications and revision dates.
*Please note, if you are going to have specifications that do not have a furnished/installed by selection, ‘Unspecified’, do not choose this option. All specs will need to have a furnished installed by option to receive an issue/revision date. Otherwise, you can choose the recommended option, ‘All Spec Types’.
Area Assignment & Classification
*Please note custom date formatting is currently in development currently the date shows as mm/dd/yyyy
You can specify the areas that you want to deliver specifications for, by assigning them to a project revision date. When generating a specification report, if you filter by area, then only the revision dates with those areas assigned (or revision dates for ALL areas) will be shown on the report. This is another way you can tailor your reports for your target audience, for example you may have different contractors working on different areas of a project.
You can also select architectural or FFE, if you are wanting those two item types to have different issue and revision dates.
There are a couple of ways you can setup the first project date for assigning to your specs
Auto assign dates to specs
Manually assign dates to specs
Using The Auto Assigning Dates
First, to have dates auto assigned to your specs, you will need to make sure the ‘Auto Assign Dates to Specs’ toggle is turned on (Blue).
Click on the +Add date
Select the Specification Type (see above)
Click on the calendar to select a date, it can be a past, current or future date
If this is the first date added to the project, it will be assigned to all the specs currently in your project as an issue date.
If this is not the first date, it will either be assigned to specs as an issue date if they were added after the last date, or as a revision date if the spec has had updates since the last date.
Important Note: Although you can create revision/issue dates in the past, changes made to your specifications since that revision date will not be highlighted on reports. Only changes made after the initial issue/revision dates are entered into the system, will be highlighted with the next revision date.
Manually Assigning Revision Dates to Specifications
When manually assigning dates to specifications, turn the blue toggle off on the overview tab, then add the date. You will see the below message pop up as a reminder that the auto assignment has been turned off.
When you are on the specs tab, to quickly assign the date to a specification, select the item and then the date from the issue/revision drop down menu. Once selected that date will automatically be assigned to the spec.
If you would like to remove/add an issue or revision date from a specification, you can go into the specification details page, click on the box in the top right corner, and uncheck or check the box beside the date.
Reviewing the specification changes associated with a date
While on the spec details page, you can select a date from the ‘Revisions For’ drop down menu. After selecting the date, if a box is ‘checked’ beside a custom attribute or a summary note, it means that information was changed in conjunction with the revision date.
When selecting a date from the ‘Revisions for’ menu and you see this triangle icon,
it is indicating that ‘Revision markers are shown for a PAST revision date, but spec information shown is CURRENT’.
If you would like to see specification what information was changed and the date, you can go to the specification history tab.
If revisions are not showing highlighted on reports, please review the list below.
Are you adding the date before updating the specs, even thought its the same day? All spec changes must be completed before the date is added to be included in the report with revision highlights.
If you are generating a report for the latest revisions, only the revisions associated with the latest revision date will show highlighted on the report.
If you are filtering on revision date under spec filters, only those items with that revision date assigned will show in the report, but you will see all the revisions associated with that date highlighted in your report.
If you would like all revisions highlighted in the report, you can uncheck the 'Show latest revisions' filter and all spec revisions will be highlighted in the report.
You can add notes to the notes tab for each item outlining the revisions with a number to each spec, I have communicated this to your team, this information is very important to your workflow, and it is possible to capture that information in DesignSpec.
We are always happy to review the project spec and date setup if the revision information highlighted that are supposed to be highlighted, but its extremely helpful if you would like our help, that you provide that information to us, so we can investigate the issue further.
Reports
Under settings there are two filters that you can use to show revision highlighting on your reports, they are selected by default but can be unchecked before the report is generated.
If both are selected, only the revision dates and changes that are associated with the most recent date added to the overview tab, will show highlighted on the report. If you want to show all revisions highlighted, you can uncheck the ‘Highlight Only Latest Revisions’ box but keep the one above checked.
To not show any highlighting on the report, you can uncheck both filters before generating the report.
Report Spec Filters
All issue and revision dates created on the overview tab are setup in a filter when generating reports. You can select one or multiple dates to generate a report with only items that have that date assigned.
Report and Cover Page Setup
You can setup a report, header/footer or cover page with issue and revision dates, you can also add the description with the date from the overview tab.
Cover page example showing the above Revision Descriptions