Zen and the Art of Sheet Setup

So, with this impending deadline, I've spent the last 48 hours setting up 70 some sheets as part of our drawing set. Ah, I can hear the virtual envy in your voices. But this has brought about some introspective thinking about how I would approach this time consuming and dramatically in-need-of-automating task:

• Rinse and Repeat - in a central database environment, it should be expected (unless noted otherwise) that a view will end up on a sheet. That being said, even though there have been great strides in making this more efficient, there is still a level of tediousness when setting up 200+ sheets, especially with plan blow-ups, etc.
  
• Think Indesign - Page layout apps have come a long way in the last 10 years, and CAD apps need to make the same strides. 'Heavy' processing of views is just tedious for large projects, wading from view lists to sheets, and easy guide snapping would be a good thing. Seriously.
• Lite is not just for Beer - With the heavy processing work occuring in the central model, a streamlined viewer or 'page layout' GUI would make life just dandy for large projects. Intelligent video card management, thumbnail placements, and only parsing the database for necessary information would make the process much more efficient and cut down the number of objects being thrown in anger around the office (we are now using only paper cups, and all bottle cap lids are confiscated in the kitchen).
  
• Group Therapy - Going back to multi-disciplanary central database models, we are currently carrying some of our consultants sheets in our BIM model, but they have no way to access and control the layout or content. Turning this into a central file for the entire family will not only make it easier to have one source of content, but allow for easier standardization of consultant sheets back to the main format and content management.
  

This is not meant to be a bitch-fest, but identification of a task that is hammering us from the efficiency side. A little more love in this area could both speed up and simplify this task as well as make it easier to push out to the entire extended team.

Food for thought, I'm going to bed.

G'night Jonboy,