Ability to toggle between imperial and metric in global settings.

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• 12 May, '23
  Ben Zuill-Smith Admin

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  While WinBidPro was originally made for estimating, a lot of users have been using it for fabrication and orders for years. We continue to increase the precision of our drawings, cut lists, and reports for this reason. So we do everything we can to ensure we don't introduce a lot of rounding error that could lead people to see measurements that don't add up quite right. That would reduce confidence in the results of the program. Not saying we won't implement what you are asking for here, but we'll move forward cautiously with such a feature.

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• 12 Apr, '23
  Patrick Millard Admin

  We do plan to add metric measurements and selectable currencies to v16, but these settings will apply to a particular catalog and will not be something you can toggle on and off for certain jobs in a catalog.
  
  With that said, once a catalog is set to metric and another currency, it stands to reason that it should not be switched back to imperial measurements or another currency. The plan would be to have different catalogs for the different settings.

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• 13 Apr, '23
  Romulus Silaghi

  The dimension system chosen should be separated from the currency settings (different issues).
  When building an elevation, we would like to be able to enter metric or imperial dimensions and have as output on the screen and reports either metric or imperial.
  Your developers should be able to do this rather easily independently of the catalogs. If they build a conversion module in the background, they will be able to use it for inputs and outputs as well.

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• 13 Apr, '23
  Ben Zuill-Smith Admin

  While in theory this sounds easy enough, in practice it is much more nuanced. We already do some rounding to have nice fractions in imperial. Simply converting and rounding these numbers to metric (whole mm) can lead to odd situations. For example, a 1000mm opening being broken up by things that don't add up to 1000mm because of rounding error. Imagine 1000mm/3 = 333.33mm and now round that to 333mm. Now your dimensions add up to 999mm but the full length should be 1000mm. Would this be okay?
  
  This is why we plan to have metric catalogs. The values for everything will be stored in whole mm and you won't get strange rounding issues like I mention above from converting from imperial. Again, it doesn't mean we can't do what you are asking, but there will be all sorts of rounding weirdness if we do.

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• 18 Apr, '23
  Romulus Silaghi

  Ben,
  It makes sense what you are saying for a production software where the precision would be very important. Keep in mind that at this point WinBidPro is an estimating software where the rounding errors should not matter that much.
  
  P.S. When using the V16 I've noticed that in the summary report that job area comes in smaller that the glass area (by a big margin). I calculated manually the job area to verify.
  Is it something I don't know?
  
  Thank you!

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• 08 Jun, '24
  Brian Barnhill

  Ben, the way I see it being the most efficient is to have a "Metric Dimension" field where we would enter the Architect's 3000mm width, 2000mm height.
  This would avoid the lengthy process of converting every number for every frame.
  Then your system would have an adjacent field to each of these that would display the imperial equivalent [rounded to the nearest 1/16" or 1/32" as per default configuration]. Your software would only use the imperial numbers for its calculations.
  Then when it comes to actual sizes for fabrication cut lists, the user can override the imperial dimension [assuming they work in imperial].

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