Enabling or Disabling Project Management

QUESTION

I receive the following question when opening X17 for the first time: 




Should I enable this feature?

OR

How do I enable or disable Project Management, or switch back and forth between the two at any time? 

ANSWER

Project Management is a feature introduced in Chief Architect X17, and it offers a number of advantages, including:

• Protecting links between plans, layouts, and assets such as materials and PDFs
• Backing up your Chief Architect projects and user settings to local disk
• Accessing and managing of all files directly within Chief Architect

In order to perform these tasks, Chief Architect saves all of your projects (plans and layouts), user catalog, user settings (toolbars, hotkeys, preferences, etc.) into a hidden location on your computer's file system and assigns each file a unique hashed name. By doing this, these files are not easily accessible outside of the Chief Architect program, until they are exported. Instead, all of your files are accessed and managed directly within the program using the Project Browser and Asset Management dialog. To learn more about Project Management, please see the Related Articles section, along with your program's documentation.

If you are prompted with the question at the beginning of this article, click Yes to enable this functionality, or No to continue using Traditional File Management.

Project Management can be enabled or disabled at any time by accessing your Preferences.

To enable or disable Project Management

1. Select Edit> Preferences  if you're on a Windows computer or Chief Architect> Preferences if you're on a Mac.
   
   
   
2. On the Project Management panel of the Preferences dialog, check or uncheck the Use Chief Architect Project Management box, then click OK.
   
   In order to change between Project Management and Traditional File Management, all plan and layout files must be closed.
   
   
   
   
   
3. A Preparing Settings dialog will appear. Once this dialog disappears, you can begin working.
   
   
   
   
   If you are switching from Project Management to Traditional File Management, you may also receive a Question dialog asking "Would you like to back up managed resources?" Click Yes or No to proceed.
   
   
   Note: A backup of your managed resources saves all of your projects (plans and layouts), user catalog, user settings (toolbars, hotkeys, preferences, etc), and assets into a compressed (zipped) folder located within the Chief Architect Data folder. To learn more, see the Related Articles section below.