Why duplicates appear across drawings
Two things routinely leave the same symbol split across a project. Auto Count often needs two captures to find every instance of one symbol, which leaves a pair of groups behind. And when Search all drawings in category runs a symbol search on every sibling drawing in the background, that pair lands on all of them.
The result is a Totals sheet with two rows where there should be one, on every drawing. Tidying it drawing by drawing is exactly the work Review mode exists to remove.
Where the actions are
Everything here happens in Review mode. Click the sidebar toggle — the tooltip reads Expand sidebar — and pick a drawing's tab. See The cross-drawing summary for the panel as a whole.
Group-level actions are limited on a drawing you do not have open. The merge , duplicate and add buttons on those rows are greyed out with the tooltip Not available for non-active file, as is Delete in the menu. What you can do from here is move and delete individual detections, which is what most tidying actually needs.
Merging detections into another group
- 1
In Review mode, click the tab of the drawing you want to tidy.
- 2
Expand the Detection group holding the detections you want to move. The thumbnails load the first time you open it.
- 3
Click a thumbnail to select it. Its border turns red. Click more thumbnails to build up a selection.
- 4
Right-click any selected thumbnail and hover Merge Into , or Merge Selected (N) when several are selected.
- 5
Pick the destination group from the submenu. It lists every other Detection group on that same drawing, each with its template thumbnail.
The detections move immediately. There is no confirmation.
You can also drag a thumbnail onto another Detection group's row on the same drawing — the target row highlights in its colour as you pass over it, and everything currently selected moves with it.
Deleting detections
- 1
Select the thumbnails you want to remove.
- 2
Right-click and choose Delete Detection(s) in red.
There is no confirmation and no undo. The detections are removed from the drawing straight away, and undo is not available in this build. Before a large tidy-up on a project you cannot afford to redo, duplicate the project first — see Duplicating a project.
The cross-drawing merge offer
Merging two groups on the drawing you have open is the ordinary group merge described in Merging groups. What is new is what happens next.
When ZeroCount can see the same pair of groups on other drawings in the project, it offers to repeat the merge there too. A dialog appears titled Merge on N other drawing(s)?, telling you which group went into which, and listing the drawings where the same pair was found with the number of groups that would be merged on each.
- 1
Merge two groups on the open drawing as normal, from the button on a Detection row or Merge into in a group's menu.
- 2
Read the list of drawings in the dialog that appears.
- 3
Click Merge on N drawing(s) to repeat it, or Cancel to leave the other drawings alone.
The dialog cannot be dismissed by clicking outside it — use the button, Esc or the close button, all of which decline.
Skipped drawings
Some drawings are listed under Skipped: with a reason:
| Reason | What it means |
|---|---|
Completed | The drawing is marked Completed, so nothing writes to it. Set it back to In Progress if you want it included. |
two or more groups here match — merge them first | That drawing has more than one candidate for the destination, so there is no single right answer. Open it and merge by hand. |
Drawings that simply never held this pair of groups are not listed at all. The list is deliberately short so the two reasons that do matter stand out.
Stopping the question
Tick Always merge on other drawings without asking in the dialog and the offer stops appearing — merges are repeated on matching drawings automatically. You can turn it back on later under User Preferences in the Confirmations section, as Merging groups across drawings.
When nothing matches
If no other drawing holds the pair, the dialog is titled Nothing to merge on other drawings and offers only Close. The merge on your own drawing still happened.
Whether a cross-drawing merge survives a reload depends on your server build. Where the matching information has not yet been deployed, a merge you make on one drawing applies locally but the other drawings are not offered, or revert on reload. Check the Total tab after a cross-drawing merge and repeat any that did not stick.
A working pattern for end of project
- 1
Go to Review mode and select the Total tab.
- 2
Set Group By: Label so the same group name across several drawings reads as one row.
- 3
Look for near-duplicate labels — the same symbol captured twice — and note which drawings they are on.
- 4
Open one of those drawings, merge the pair, and accept the cross-drawing offer so the rest follow.
- 5
Click Refresh summaries and check the Total tab again.
Group By on the Total tab merges rows for display only — nothing on any drawing changes. Use it to see what the workbook will look like before you commit to a real merge, and leave it on where the groups should genuinely stay separate.
Common issues
The merge submenu is empty
There is only one Detection group on that drawing, so there is nowhere to merge to. Merging always happens within a single drawing; the cross-drawing offer is a separate step that repeats the same merge elsewhere.
The offer did not appear
ZeroCount only offers drawings where it can identify the same pair of groups. Groups captured before this feature existed, imported from a template, or created by an Auto Detect Symbols scan carry no matching information, so their merges are not offered elsewhere. Merge those drawings by hand.
A drawing was skipped as Completed
Completed drawings are protected from background changes. Set it back to In Progress from Actions → Mark as In Progress and merge again, or merge on that drawing directly. See Drawing status.
Next steps
- Merging groups — the single-drawing merge this builds on.
- The cross-drawing summary — the panel these actions live in.
- Preparing a project for export — the rest of the pre-export sweep.
- Exporting to Excel — produce the workbook once the tidying is done.