Cabinet Solutions: Designer

Initial Values

The first button in the left hand column is called Initial Values. This set of standards includes sections for setting what are called initial values for: Appliances, Cabinet Heights and Depths, Windows and Doors, Drawers, Nailers and Stretchers, Shelves, Fillers (for Euro only), Radius and Clipped Cabinets and Toe Kicks. This section is first because the standards set here work a little differently than the rest of the standards. Standards are the specifications for the way you build your cabinets. All other standards not under this Initial Values section can be changed again and again and at any time during the course of a job and those changes will be reflected in your display and cut list. The information set in the Initial Values section only affects the cabinet at the time of sizing and placement.

To help you better understand this distinction, let's compare 2 different standards. First, let's look at the way a regular shelf standard works. In Job Standards, click on the Shelves button. In the window that opens you will see a setting for the dado depth of a base fixed shelf. This refers to the depth that any fixed shelf, placed in a base cabinet, that will be dadoed into the sides of that cabinet. The factory default for that standard is 1/4". So, if you were to place 4 base cabinets all with 1 fixed shelf, those shelves would all be dadoed into the sides of their respective cabinets by 1/4". If after you placed those 4 cabinets you changed that standard to 1/8", those shelves would all resize to reflect the new value you've entered. The standards in the Initial Values section work differently.

In Job Standards, click on the Initial Values button and then click on the Shelves button. Here you can set the typical number of fixed shelves you want in an upper cabinet, the factory default being 2. If you were to place 4 upper cabinets in a job they would all have 2 fixed shelves in them. If you want to change them later, you can NOT do it by changing Standards. If you change the settings in Standards to 1 fixed shelf per base, any future cabinets you place will have just 1 shelf, but the first four cabinets you've placed will still have 2 shelves each. There are other ways of changing the number of shelves later in the program, but Job Standards will not work.