Materials · Matériaux

Materials · Matériaux holds the catalogue of common building materials in Québec.

• It has 488 items in 11 families, from drywall to reinforcement.
• Each item is described without a brand, in English and French.
• You can add your company’s own items.

Tell your assistant what you are looking for: it does the work with Materials. The requests below are examples. Put them in your own words.

What a record holds

• a generic description, in English and French;
• the actual dimensions, in millimetres;
• the material, the standard (CSA, ASTM, CAN/ULC, NLGA), the grade, the unit of sale and the packaging;
• the weight of a unit of sale, only when a data sheet gives it.

When no data sheet gives a value, the record says “not provided”. No value is estimated.

What you can ask

You ask	What Materials does
“Show me the drywall panels.”	Searches the base catalogue and your own items. If you name a family, you get that family only.
“Give me drywall and its accessories.”	Adds the related accessories, marked as such: steel framing, joint compounds and tapes, corners, adhesive, screws.
“What is the record for the 3 5/8 in steel stud?”	Shows the full record. A value that no data sheet gives is marked “not provided”.
“Make me a PDF catalogue of drywall.”	Produces a PDF catalogue, an Excel file or both, in English or French. Each material has its isometric view. The PDF is Letter size, 12 materials per sheet. The download links stay valid for one hour.
“Add our own drywall panel.”	Records an item of your company. This item can complete or replace a record of the base catalogue.
“I want to import our materials list.”	Creates an upload page, valid for one hour, for an Excel or CSV file of 5 MB and 20,000 rows at most. You then see a preview before the import.
“Match the parts of our inventory with the catalogue.”	Matches your Inventory parts with the catalogue’s items and proposes the values missing from their records: weight, dimensions, material. Nothing is written to Inventory without your approval.

Import your list

Before the import, the preview shows you:

• the recognized columns;
• the first 10 rows;
• the rows set aside;
• the effect of each of the two import modes.

You then choose a mode:

• “nouvelles” (new): only items whose code does not exist yet are added;
• “mettre à jour” (update): existing items also take the file’s values. An empty cell erases nothing.

Confirm the import on the “Importer / Annuler” (Import / Cancel) card. If your app does not show the card, type “Import” in the conversation. No import deletes a record.

Here is what the import does with your file:

• Quantity, location, barcode or price columns are flagged, but never imported. Quantities stay in Inventory.
• A scaffold part (frame, guardrail, jack, plank…) is set aside, and the reason is given.
• Dimensions are taken when the description writes them clearly, for example “1/2 in 4 ft x 8 ft” or “2x4 8 ft”.
• The weight is never inferred.
• An item of your file is matched to a base record only when nothing stands against it: same family, compatible dimensions and no contrary qualifier. For example, a “regular” drywall is not matched to a “lightweight” drywall. Otherwise, the item stays your company’s own.

The catalogues

• Each material has its isometric view, drawn from its dimensions.
• The colour of the view shows the material.
• Similar materials of the same family are drawn at the same scale.
• A thin profile also has an enlarged section.
• When a dimension is missing, the view is drawn in usual proportions and the box says what is missing.

Each PDF page carries the TektonAI reference, its check code and a QR code. They prove that the document comes from TektonAI. The Excel file carries the same reference in the first row of each sheet. See Check that a document comes from TektonAI.