Create Material and Site Improvement Categories

Use categories to organize your materials and site improvements into logical groups for the way you work. There are two categories for earthen materials included by default: Earthen (Mass earthworks) and Earthen (Select). As essential categories, these cannot be renamed or removed. The Earthen material categories are unique because they allows you to specify how you want to enter and calculate shrinkage, haul bulkage, and haul compaction values. For more information, see Earthen Material Categories.

There is also one generic and one specific site improvement category (Utility).

To create a category:

Under Project Library or External Library in the explorer, select either Materials or Site Improvements, depending on the type of category you want to create in the appropriate library.
Do one of the following:
- Right-click and select New...Category from the context menu.
- Select Edit > New...Category.
- Click the New...Category icon on the toolbar.
The material or site improvement category appears in the library.
Type a name for the new category in the Name box.
Click on any other item in the explorer pane to save the name. For a category to be saved, it must contain at least one entry.