There are a number of criteria that can be specified by the user. By setting the criteria properly, designs can be obtained that conform to the design philosophies of the engineer without requiring extensive member size selection modifications. After a design has been performed, these criteria can be modified to further refine the designs. Default criteria are set by the Defaults Utility in the RAM Manager but can be modified on a project-by-project basis within the Column Design module.

If any criteria selections are modified after a model has been analyzed and designed, the optimized member designs will be cleared from the database so that new optimized designs can be obtained based on the newly specified criteria. Modifying the Design Defaults criteria and Bracing criteria also causes the Framing Tables to be rebuilt (see Section 2.4). Upon issuing the command to change a criteria item, a warning dialog box will appear on the screen stating that proceeding with this command will clear all previously optimized sizes. The command can be canceled at this time without affecting the database.