Every now and then, you may run into a situation where you would like a new line or row on your Form 3 table, but not an additional balloon to go with it. That is where our "Create Linked Characteristic" tool comes in. By right-clicking on any row in your Form 3 table, the first two options, "Create Linked Characteristic without Balloon" and "Create Multiple Linked Characteristics" will create an additional line, that acts like a sub-number, without creating a balloon alongside it.

For example, if you create a linked characteristic for characteristic #2, the new row will be 2.1.

You can also create multiple rows at a time by selecting the "Create Multiple Linked Characteristics" button. This will open a window that gives you additional options to help you carry over any information from the parent row. When creating multiple linked characteristics, you can choose to copy over the Requirement, Tolerance, Tooling, Comments, and the Nonconformance # fields, as well as any additional custom fields if you have any.

That way, you can accurately copy over information to each child row without having to manually copy and paste each field over and over again.

If you ever need to create an additional balloon for a single characteristic, you can do exactly that by using "Add Duplicate Balloon to Characteristic", found by right-clicking within any Form 3 table row.

This duplicate balloon behaves the same as any other balloon, and can be moved and edited as well.

This niche feature can be especially useful when you have a characteristic that refers to another figure in your drawing, and may come in handy depending on your customer's specific needs.

Every once in a while, you may find yourself in a situation where a balloon has gone missing. If this does happen, you can right-click the row in your table associated with that characteristic, and click the "Re-Sync Characteristic & Annotation" button. This will refresh the balloon and characteristic, placing it once more where it would have populated by default.

Typically, you will not encounter any situations where you need to use this feature. However, if you do, please reach out to us at [email protected] or [email protected], or start a live chat with us on our website to report any bugs and issues.

While GroundControl is extremely accurate at reading and understanding text, if you balloon a characteristic and our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) does not correctly capture the information you have selected, you have the option to ask our AI model to try again.

By right-clicking the row in your table associated with that characteristic, and clicking the "Re-Parse Annotation Text" button, GroundControl will try to parse the annotation text once again.

If you are attempting to make a balloon for a characteristic that our OCR cannot understand, or if the content you want to capture is not text (such as a diagram), you have the option to capture it as an image.

By right-clicking the row in your table associated with that characteristic, and clicking the "Use image for characteristic requirement" button, GroundControl  will paste the exact snippet you created into the "Requirement" field, instead of attempting to parse it into text.

Now, when you export your report, the image snippet will populate in the relevant cell of your exported file, exactly as shown. This is incredibly useful when capturing complex information. This can also be disabled if you change your mind, the same way it was enabled.

Additionally, if the content you attempted to capture happened to not be upright, you can right-click the requirement field in the corresponding row, and click the "Rotate Image 90° Clockwise" button to rotate the image.