New features have been released for Quick Sections that might require changes to your existing Strip templates (time of writing: September 2024)

Most notable is the release of Strip Profiles. In the past, only a single Strip could be selected for a Quick Section template, which would be used for all Locations. It is now possible to instead use a Strip Profile, which allows different Strips to be used for different Locations. Alongside this change, other enhancements and new features have also been released.

If you are setting up your Quick Section templates to use Strip Profiles or other new features, it is possible to use your existing Strips, but there are a few considerations to be aware of. In some cases, you might need to make some modifications to optimize your Strips for these new features.

Making a Copy of Your Strips

If any of the considerations below apply to your existing templates, and you need to make design modifications, you may want to make a copy of your existing templates. This will ensure your existing Strip and Quick Section templates continue to work as they currently do should you need them in the future, and then you can modify the copies of the templates.

To do this, click Save and give your template a new name, which will effectively create a new copy that you can modify.

You may want to do this for both Strip and Quick Section templates.

If you don't foresee needing your existing Strip and Quick Section templates, you can modify your existing templates.

(If you are going to make changes to your configuration, it's never a bad idea to first export a copy of your config pack as a backup from which you can retrieve original components if things go awry. You can do this under System>Configuration Packs>Export Pack.)

Column Widths

There is a known issue with legacy 'single-strip' Quick Sections in that the column widths on the final report (PDF) do not always respect the column widths of the Strip templates.

However, Strip Profiles do respect the design column widths of the Strip templates.

The impact of this is that if you use an existing Strip in a Strip Profile, it may end up plotting much wider or narrower than you are used to.

For example, below the same Strip is used on both a single-strip Quick Section and a Quick Section using Strip Profiles. The Graphic column is designed to be 8 mm-wide, as it appears using Strip Profiles, but is 4 mm-wide on a single-strip Quick Section.

The reason for this is that legacy single-strip Quick Sections do not properly respect the Strip template column widths if the Strip and Quick Section templates use different Grid Sizes.

In the example above, the Strip uses a 'Medium Grid' (2 mm-square cells), but the Quick Section templates uses a 'Small Grid' (1 mm-square cells). When the Quick Section is generated, it uses the Small Grid size for the Strip even thought it is designed with Medium Grids, so the Strips end up plotting at half the design width. The Grid Sizes are defined when you create the Strip template, and can not be changed afterword.

If this occurs for you, you can adjust the column widths by opening the Strip template and going to Design>Edit>Depth Columns. In the example above, the widths could be reduced by half to get a more familiar appearance.

Note that this issue should not occur using single-strip Quick Sections if the Strip and Quick Section templates both use the same Grid Size.

Strip Profile Quick Sections should always respect the Strip template column widths and shouldn't be impacted by the Grid Size of the Quick Section template.

Vertical Axis Offset Behavior (Blank space due to wide Strips)

On Quick Sections, Strips are automatically offset from the vertical axis to prevent collision with the axis. The offset is equal to the half the width of the left-most or right-most Strip, whichever is larger.

This behavior hasn't changed drastically recently, but we've had an uptick in questions about this behavior. (Perhaps it is more noticeable now due to the issue above with the Column Widths?)

We've observed that some Strips have been designed excessively wide, in which case you will see an unnecessarily large offset.

For example, below there are 80 mm-wide columns to show the Depth and Geology Codes, which results in a large offset.

These columns would typically just be short text strings and don't need to be this wide. If they are narrowed, such as to 10 mm-wide, the offset reduces accordingly to a more reasonable amount.

Other New Features

Other new features have been released for Quick Sections which you might want to incorporate into your existing Strips.

For example, you can now set a 'Section Centre Column' for Quick Sections to keep your Strips centered around a desired column. (In the past, Strips had to be designed symmetrically around the desired column.)

There are also options to automatically Hide Columns in Quick Section Strips.

And there are also new functions that can be used on Quick Section templates.