Autodesk University Tips and Tricks to Enhance Productivity in Revit

Transcription

1 Autodesk University Tips and Tricks to Enhance Productivity in Revit All right. Last class, right? Exciting. So I realized in all my classes this week, I've forgotten to introduce myself. So I'm going to do that now. If you were in any of my classes, know you retroactively know who I am. My name's Desiree Mackey. I'm a structural engineering. I work for Martin/Martin in Denver, Colorado. We're a company that does a million different projects, from very, very tiny to very, very large, which for me is really exciting because as I've moved sort of away from traditional design engineering and project management into more of a BIM manager role, I still have my hands in a huge range of structures, which is really interesting to me. So I'm excited and kind of blinded in being part of the live streaming today. I'm a little nervous because they say the camera adds 10 pounds or in my case, added a baby. Hopefully the other presenters didn't have the same problem. Be like, oh, shoot. I went to Vegas-- oh. All right. So this is the last session. It's intended to be tips and tricks, lots of picks and clicks, random things. I am a structural engineer, so some of the examples are going to be structural. But a lot of them are general, too. And I'd like to encourage you, although this is a large group, I think, especially since it's the last class of the day, I think we can have some fun with it. So if you want to jump up and offer a tip of your own, maybe you think of something off of what I said, you want to extrapolate or maybe add something to what I've said, jump up to one of these microphones. I'll see you, and you can add one of your own tips. I've got a whole list of things to get through. If we don't get through them all, they're all in the handout. They're all in the PowerPoint that you can download. And you can look at them later. I also have a list on the back page of the handout of a whole bunch of other things that I was like, there's no way I can do this in an hour. So there's a ton of content. And we'll see what we get through. So I had a hard time writing the learning objectives for this class because my goal was-- I don't know, I see a lot of green ribbons. But for those of you that have been to AU before or maybe another conference, for me-- maybe you agree-- when you go to a presentation, you can get a lot of great things out of it. But sometimes what you really remember is that, like, one little, golden nugget of information. And so my goal here was just provide one golden nugget after another. And maybe one you already know, or maybe one doesn't apply to you. But I'm hoping

2 that every one of you walk out of here with something you can use. So that's kind of the main goal, is to walk out with something exciting. All right. So this is my first tip. I'm going to jump back and forth between PowerPoint and Revit here. So hopefully that doesn't cause any issues too much. So here's my first one. I was really excited about this when this came out in 2015, and then 2016 also. We can now include in our tags for foundations and floors the top of footing or top of slab elevation. Right? How many people loved that. Nobody? OK. Jeez. Come on. Enthusiasm, people. get ready for that party. So this was great. First thing I did, got in there, edited the tags, added those elevations. And then we started putting them in projects. And we started seeing this. My spot elevation is 88, and my tag says 98. Why is that? So the problem is that somebody moved your project base point unclicked. Revit has sort of a- - I call it the internal coordinates-- third coordinate system. It's the original project coordinates. So if you change those, if you move the coordinate system separate from your building, you've now broken that relationship. And for some reason, these tags reference that original place. So here, I'll show you this in action. So here I have a foundation. Here's just a spot elevation, the top of footing. And here's the tag. Now, if I do what you should not do, and grab the project base point, and I change its elevation, all your levels and everything are going to look correct. They're going to be the right relative distance from that project base point. But all of your structural tags that have elevations on them will be wrong. So if you're a structural engineer, be aware of this. If you are somebody who works with a structural engineer, be aware of how you move your project around in the coordinates. Don't create a situation where the only way to make the levels and the elevations recorrect is by moving that base point unclicked. There are ways around this. If you get stuck, me. I will help you. Because in the last year, we've had so many projects have this problem because we never had to worry about it before. And now we did. OK? Next one. This one's probably pretty basic, but I really like using the symbolic lines in opening tools because this way-- well, it's two reasons. One, because I'm lazy with the shaft openings. I just kind of draw it and don't worry about where the top and bottom is. And then all

3 I can see when I finish is the X. And I can find it. But also because then you have the X on all your plans. So you don't have to now go back in with the lines and draw out every single plan where your opening is. Everybody familiar with this? Yeah? I'll show you. So here's a shaft opening. And inside the sketch, after you've drawn your boundary line-- here, I'll try another one over here-- you can switch to symbolic line. And you can draw little lines. And finish. So now, as you go to other levels, the X is there. This one's for everybody. So I love the copy and paste aligned tools. It works for a lot of things. I can copy and paste from a linked file. I can cop and paste from levels, from views, or really just anything. So that shaft opening-- or let's do the slab, in fact. So if I were to-- is it on level two? I'll get rid of that. Let's delete it from level two. All gone. All right. So now I have level two, no slab. So I go back to level one, and I want the slab in the exact same place. I can say Copy to Clipboard. Go to my level two and paste aligned to my current view. So it'll put a slab in the exact same place. I like this for repetitive buildings, right? So you can model all your floor framing and your floors, select everything, and copy it up a whole bunch of levels. And in that case, you can say Paste Aligned to Selected Levels. And you can pick in the list and hold down Control and pick all of them, and you just build your building. You guys aren't super excited. Nothing exciting yet? I gave this presentation at work and there was applause three times. Usually, people are falling asleep when I talk. All right. So this one I like because I like math. And if you've been to any my presentations ever, I probably cannot give a presentation without some sort of math in it. And this is not only a time-saver but just kind of makes things easy for you. And this is one of those things that makes me want to, like, take the keyboard from somebody when you're helping them. You're like, just press the-- OK, you know what I'm talking about. So, for example, this is the most random file ever. Sorry. But it has purpose. I promise. All right. So if I wanted to move this column over, let's say, or maybe I want to copy it over-- either way. Anything that you're going to give a value. It could be literally you're giving a value or you're defining a value by clicking twice. You can say, oh, I need it over 7 foot, 6 inches. So you can go 7 foot dash 6 inches. I apologize to the metric folks. One thing that I found out, you also, instead of putting the inch mark, you can actually put two

4 apostrophes. That works, too. But that is a lot of the Shift button. And it's both sides of the keyboard. And that just doesn't work for me. So what you can do is you can go 7-6. That's the same thing. Or 7 space 6. That's the same thing. Or you could put some sort of math, like equals 25 divided by 2, whatever, which is not 7.6. Minus 5. Now it is. OK. So you guys just want to catch me in a math error now, don't you? Oh, go ahead. Microphone so they can hear you at home. Desi, pick the column on the right so that you get a temporary dimension. Pick the 2" 6' and make it negative 2" 6' and it flips on the opposite side of whatever your referenced dimension is, too. That's a good one. That's a good one. With these temporary dimensions-- yeah. [APPLAUSE] Way to break the ice. These temporary dimensions you can also change. Right? So you can toggle them. If you click on them, they'll go left, right, or center. You can also move them. Like, I don't care about the dimensions of the grid. I care about the dimension to the column, which happen to be the same dimension. So you can move those around. I got-- Go for it. You mentioned sorry to the metric folks. One thing that's cool, though, is when you do put in a value there, you can actually do that unit conversion. You totally can because we have a job right now in metric. So I've been working in metric for a few weeks. And I've been doing that. You actually can. I hope this actually works. You could put, like, 12 millimeters. That would be really small. Let's do 120 millimeters. And it'll change it. It converts it for you. That's a really good one. Now, could you mix a formula and units? I'm not going to try because I have no-- [LAUGHTER]

5 Well, we could try it, but how would we check it? Somebody get out a calculator and convert it for me. Well, we'll see if it yells at us. How about that? OK. So we'll do something I know millimeters times 12 plus 1 foot. Oh, I needed an equals. Equals. That was impressive. All right. So I learned something in my own class here. OK. Well, so I'm done. I've got my golden nugget. I'm out of here. OK. This is a good one, too, and this has gotten better. I would say it was-- I don't want to say not worth it, but not as useful prior to 2015, release two. It's better now. I like this etransmit mostly for sending something out of house. I don't like it-- I have some people in the office that use it for internal purposes. I don't love it for that because what it produces is a completely stripped down file that saves you a whole bunch of steps. But it's sort of a file in limbo. It's the best way I can describe it. It's not a central file, but it wants to be a central file, and it doesn't know what to be until you open it. And I'm OK with that when I send it to my client because they need to open it anyway. But if I save it off onto my server, although it works and we haven't seen any problems, it just doesn't feel warm and fuzzy to me. So I like this for external. So the way this works-- oops. Do that again. I'll just close this for a minute. Sure. And I'm working in a local file on purpose. So I really hope nothing crashes. But what you can do-- oh, of course. It's not loaded. Awesome. Nice work. Let's see. What can I do? Do you guys want to see this live, or do you want me explain this? Because I can probably show it to you live. I just have to get into-- oh, I'll just show it to you here for sake of time. But I'm on the wrong computer for the actual add-in. But on your add-in tab, this is a subscription product. So you can just download it. It comes in on your add-in tab. Yeah. Add-ins. And it looks like this-- Transmit a Model. This is confusing. I have three things I'm trying to do stuff with. All right. So it comes in-- that is really hard see. OK. The Transmit Model right there. And then this is the dialogue box you get. So it'll save these properties, too. So if you're working on one project for the most part, you can do this one time, set it, down here to save it, and you can do it one time. So you can't have a project open, just have Revit open. Then you say where you want what model you want, where you want to save it, and then what do you want to do. So you can include your linked files or not. And it'll unload them. But it'll still be linked. So you have to reload when it gets there. But it doesn't remove them. If you say you don't want to include them, it will not package up your linked files with your file.

6 And it'll unload the links, but it still won't remove them. So if you like to remove the links, you have to still get into the project. It'll remove views. It will purge unused. It's a single purge, not a triple purge or a quadruple, sometimes is what it takes. But it does get the bulk of it. And you can remove sheets or any combination, really, thereof. So what you can do is in a few minutes, toggle your settings the way you want, and then save off a detached copy of your file to send out. And if you have, like, an FTP situation or maybe Dropbox, where you have a file location where you're saving that, and that's all you have to do to send the file, you could send it right there and eliminate the step of then copy and pasting and removing it. Anybody use this? Good. OK. All right. So how many of you love the text editor? It's fabulous, right? Does everything you want it to do? All right. So it doesn't, but it does have some better features now in the last several releases. And this is one of those-- I heard a co-worker say to me, oh, man, I was could do a numbered list in Revit. And I'm like, well, they kind of suck, but you can do it. So you can. So I'll show you. One more time, get back in my local file. OK. So if I put in a little text box here-- try to make it big enough. So maybe we're going to do some sort of note. And then you want this to be a numbered list. So you have numbers and whatever. So item one-- whatever. So the downside of these is that there's no sub-numbering. So if I Tab, it just tabs over. Right? Doesn't work. And then you can't skip a line. If you want to go down a line and then do another, now you're starting over at one, and you can't really. And then I had somebody suggest, well, what if you do a Shift-Enter? Let's see. Oh, that was the thing. So you can't also-- like you want to have a second line without the 3. But if you do a Shift-Enter, it'll be indented on that next line down. And I was like, that's awesome. That's great. And so I was like, OK, next text. Let's see if this-- I haven't tested this in 16. So maybe it'll work. Look what it did. You're like, oh. You're like, yes, Revit! Oh, no. So like I said, they're not awesome, but they are there. And this tab dimension, that default dimension between the numbers and the text is in your text type properties. So if you have a really big tab dimension, just go into your Edit Type down here, in this tab size. You can change that. So they do exist, but they just do have limitations. So when I gave this presentation at work--

7 Can I ask a quick question? Great. Go ahead. With the text, has anybody ever come across where you can set the wipeout boundary around the text really tiny? Like so if you're wiping out text, you're only wiping out text, not a big band around the text. Is that something doable? Does anybody off the top of their head know the answer to that? Right here? That's where I was going. That was my first inclination. So you can change that. I don't know how close to the text-- I mean, put zero in. Oh, it won't let you do zero? That's awesome. Yeah, I don't know if that's really that close to the text. I don't know if that quite gets you there. But it's close. Transparent text in a-- no that'd be bad. Don't do that. I take it back. Undo. OK. So any other on that one? Sorry, that one's kind of a fail. That's the good thing about this, right? We can have things that are great, things that are bad, things that are not quite there. But we can talk about it. All right. So when I first did this presentation, I crowdsourced some of these tips and tricks from the people in my department because I didn't want it to be all the things that I thought was great. I wanted it to be the things that they thought was great. And so a lot of these actually came from my coworkers. Hey, this is what I do all the time. And this one came from our production manager. And we kind of went rounds on how to do this because I actually didn't really like his idea. But in the end, with some tweaking of how to actually execute it in Revit, his idea was actually the right one. So props to him. So he wanted a way to-- we have these designer notes. Does anybody have these? They're little designer notes. Actually, they look much different now. We've changed our standards. They're like big and purple. But when we bring in, like, a template detail, a reference detail, something that we use all time, they come in with these designer notes. So they're notes to the engineer saying, hey, this and this and this need to be sized still or edit this for your project or this is current to whatever code. Change this value. Stuff like that that you need to know.

8 So we have those. And what we found is that we didn't want them to come into the details because people were forgetting to delete them, and then they were printing their drawings. So we moved them out of the details, and we put them into the title blocks on the reference detail sheets. And then people would bring in just the detail and not the sheet, and they'd lose the notes. So we wanted to move the notes back into the details and have a way to not have them print. So we essentially wanted, like, a no-plot layer. And so what we did was made two text types. And the first is the text type that we have for our actual notes. So it's big and purple now. And we have two kinds of these. We have the designer notes that come in our reference details, and we have one that's just comments, like if you're on a call or something, and you want to write a comment, or you want to comment to one of the other people working on a project and say, hey, adjust this or move this over, change this elevation, whatever. You don't want to do it. You just want to make a note. We have something like that, too, and I'll show you in a second. Then the next text type is this. And this actually says the exact same thing that this says. Well, I guess it says invisible instead of visible. It's the same size. So the idea was-- he's like, well, why don't we just change the text to white? And I was like, well, 'cause white will print black. It's not gonna work. So what we did is change it to a very, very light gray. It's very, very small and really compact. And if you print it-- if you typed a whole bunch and you printed and you hold it up to the light, it looks a little bit like a watermark. But you can't see it. So the workflow for this one-- I have some over here. So here's our red comments-- is that you would find one place before you print. Find one place that you have one. Do a right-click, Select All Instances. And then change it to the one that is hidden. And it looks like that. And you can't see them. Oh, look. There's three. So then you could print. And then you could do one of two things. You could undo. Or what I typically do because I know there's one here, find it. Or you could just put in another piece of the comments hidden. Put something in there. And then it's still selected. And then do a rightclick, Select All. Oh shoot, I just lost it. Now here's a foreshadowing-- Select Previous. Select All Instances In Entire Project. Or

9 theoretically, if you just placed one, you would know kind of where it was. Select All Instances, Entire Project, and change it back to the visible. So you do have some amount of work in remembering and kind of undoing. But it's a way to maintain those designer notes and have people not just delete them without reading them if you use them, or comments or anything like that. Anybody else have a method for something like that they're doing in their office? Yeah. It's similar to that. But I was looking for an arrow that didn't have text to it that I could use to-- like a slope arrow or something like that that I could just put a piece of text in. And so I created a leader style that had the text with the same 1/256 height and 0.1 width and all that. And so you have an arrow that you can use now for anything. And you just put in a period as the text. Yeah. We have that. I can demo that because we happen to have that, too. So we have it. It's called text blank. But we don't use it for the arrow. So we have everything really small. Oh, I guess it's not too small. OK. So something like that. So I don't know what I type. Just one letter. But you can do something like that. That's a great one. Go ahead. Oh, you could build a family that does that. Yeah, but then you'd have to tell people to use it and make sure they are. It doesn't have a dot. You can't see that dot. [LAUGHTER] Here, wait. I have a workaround for that, too. Now you really can't see that dot. I mean, come on. Most of the principals can't read the half-size sets, let alone see the-- [LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE] That's what you guys clap at? I really hope nobody at my work is watching this. OK. And here's our communication. Same idea. So we have these red markups. OK. This one came from somebody working on one of our stadiums right now. He was really tired of cutting a section for working purposes and having the far clip-- the section just is so deep, hundreds and hundreds of feet. And he said that instead of zooming out, panning over, and pulling it back in, he found this little property, and he didn't think that anybody knew about it. So this is a great one to mention.

10 So if I were to put in a section, and say I'm going to-- it's not particularly big because, like I said, this is kind of a ridiculous file with random things in it. But if this were a big building, it might go to the very end of the building. And that could be a very large distance, especially if I was zoomed in. Its off my screen. So now I'm doing the zoom out. And let's just pretend if it went way over there. So now we're zooming out and panning over. And then we're like, oh, there it is. Now I need to kind of get it. And then now I need to do the weird claw thing where I'm-- so here's another side tip. If you drag that off the screen, you can let go. So anything you're moving and need to pan at the same time, if you pull it off the screen, you can let go of the button. I'm not holding on, and look. It's still-- and then you can zoom out, pan over, and change it, which was not the tip. But it made me think of it. That'll work with levels. Have you ever had levels way out into oblivion. And then you've got to, and you've got this weird hand cramp by the time-- so for that one, we're gonna sidetrack myself. Same idea. So you could grab your ends of your levels, pull it till it goes off your screen, let go, and it's still-- and then now you can pan it wherever you want. Done. OK. So back to the actual tip. So this section in the properties-- and I tried to make this nice and big for the screen there. Right here, this far clip offset, you change that to something really small. And you'll have a nice thin section without having to go find the back end of your section. No. Sorry. I'd like to try to sugar coat it. You can if you-- it tries to guess. Revit is really great with automation, right? It automates a lot of things, and it guesses things for you, and it kind of does things for you. But with that, you lose some control over it. So what you're losing in control here is that it tries to sort of guess, based on the dimensions of your building, the view range of your view, how long did you draw-- all those sorts of things-- what levels are visible in your view range. And it kind of sizes itself based on what it thinks you want to see. So if you figured out what all those parameters that it considers were, you could maybe get it to default. The question was can you default that? Maybe if you're an API genius. Say that again?

11 In my view template. Oh, sure. That was a really great suggestion. If you had a view template for your sections that was set to turn on for all your sections, you could probably set that. Let's double check that that's there. That's a great idea. I don't have one, so I have to say Create. Current view? Sure. Oh. [LAUGHTER] Two. Far depth clipping, view range. Oh, I got a floor plan. Oh. Hold on. Rewind. I was like, why did I already have one? Again? Aw. Three. There we go. Let's see-- far clipping, clip without line. I'm not seeing it. All right. If you guys find that, send me an because it's not something I do. So maybe I will, and you taught me something. Yeah. See, this is where you have to apply the view template and have it be defaulted on their new sections. Mess with that. If you figure it out, and I can the group. Interesting. OK. So for everybody else, the tip was if you're working in 2015 or before, which is probably where most of us are, if you have dependent view templates on your sections, it starts to think about that information as you're drawing it. So generating those sections can take a long time. So beware. That's a good tip. Thanks. All right. This is a good one. We could do, like, five hours on this one. Right? So schedules-- we think of schedules as just something that we put on our drawings. But they're actually a really powerful tool. And what we've started to do is we put some quantity takeoffs on our drawings now-- or they're not on the drawing. They're in the model, just for our knowledge. So we can go and say, how much does this floor weigh, things like that, that's just for our knowledge. So we're starting to use it as a tool.

12 But here's another thing that I do. And this is sort of a preemptive thing to our QTO schedules because the engineers have to go in and make sure that these properties are set properly before the QTO schedules will populate. So this is just a column schedule. There's five columns in here. And there's a couple of properties that are really important for our QTO schedule. So for you guys, this might be different. But one is the material has to be correct. And you can see that for these concrete columns, it's not right. And I could have clicked all over the project and looked at that. But I can very quickly see that here. And I can change it right here. And so this'll change all the types. And then this is a custom parameter that we've created because is anybody else really annoyed that you can't filter schedules by material? Right? So I want a schedule of my steel columns. I don't really care about the concrete right now when I'm talking about the steel weight. So we added this custom parameter. And this one's not filled out. So I can fill out concrete here, and it'll fill it out for all the types. So now I've added information back into the model. Now, the other thing to keep in mind-- so here's our ridiculous model-- is that what you're seeing here is not a report. Right? It's live-linked back to it. It's just a different-- the mode's a database. The model's a database of information. And we work with the graphical database. The schedule is just a list database, essentially. It's something we're probably actually more familiar with. And so when you click on one of these elements, you're selecting the element in the model. And so if you said, oh, this doesn't-- this should be something other than 1490 that I don't have loaded in. Do I have Something else in here? Haha. So this one's really supposed to be a 12 by 18. I can change it there, and it changes. So you can work and do a whole bunch of things in schedules that you could do in here. Say you want to change all of your level two beams from one size to another. Well, make a schedule based on level, unfilter it so it's one line, and change them all at once. So stuff like that. Anybody use schedules for that? Nice. This one came from a PM in the office who had the BIM manager position. Well, it was the unofficial BIM manager, and then they made an official BIM manager. But he was me before I had the position. And this is what he does. He comes up with the great ideas because he doesn't have to solve other people's problems anymore. He just solves his own.

13 doesn't have to solve other people's problems anymore. He just solves his own. So this is what he does. And I don't have the file because it's huge and it would take forever to open. But what he does is he-- this is the wrong thing. This is a floor plan. And this is a sheet. This is a sheet view. This is a floor plan on the view. And then the only section cuts you're seeing along the side are these live views. So the only thing on here is a live floor plan and a bunch of live sections around the edges. So he's coordinating different things-- so slab edges, brick ledges, wall details, things like that that you have to coordinate. So he has his model on and the architect's model on. And puts this on a sheet view, and then he can print the sheet and do his coordination on a sheet view. Now, obviously, it's not part of his documents. But this is a really clever way to keep all that information current and in one place, and you can check it. And you could even annotate this and write notes, like move slab over, whatever you need to do. Absolutely. The comment-- you could do the same thing for column surrounds in a plan view. There's lots of applications for this. So sheets don't have to be for printing. This is clearly a huge sheet. Right? I think this is a convention space. So that's not going to fit on one sheet as it this. But a sheet view, just to compile all these things he wants to look at at once. So you can just get a lot faster. Oh. So I had to put this one in here. I didn't put my cell phone number on the slide, but one of my coworkers submitted this as her suggestion for my presentation. And she's like, this is the only tip you need. This Is it. And I thought it was really funny. So my point here is that talk to your coworkers, your BIM manager's, me or other experts in the community, and crowdsource information. We have a community. We have a community here. Ask other people what they do. And maybe you're not going to do exactly the same thing. But maybe what they do helps you think of an idea. So I don't want you to text me in the middle of the night. But you can me. Actually, I think my cell phone number is on my card. OK. So I wish I had prizes. But does anybody remember what release it was that all of a sudden, when we started double-clicking, our project would open the family editor? 13? That's what I thought. Didn't we love that? I see your heads going like this. I mean, it was like every time you wanted to put information in your title block, all of a sudden the title block opened.

14 Every single time. Right? Awful. However, how many people love the activating and deactivating views on your sheets with the double-click? That one's great, right? OK. So here's where you can change that. So in your application menu, which is the big R, you can go to User Interface. And there's this double click options optimize. I set this in our deployments so everybody has our-- I think these are our defaults. I don't know if they're different than the actual out-of-the-box defaults. But you can set them in your deployments. You can set them individually. So if you want your users to be able to open the families by double-clicking on them, go ahead and you can change that. But you can turn on and off the handful of double-click options you have. Go ahead. The big R? Yeah. Flip over to Revit real fast if you can. If anybody's ever experiencing where you're placing windows, and it starts taking 20 seconds just to place a window or copy a window or move a window or a door perhaps-- You want to go to Options? Yes. The reason for that is the analytical model. And if you go to User Interface-- yeah, maybe it's on General. I don't remember where it is. No, it's where you turn on and off, like, the different options. Oh, this is just Structure. This is Revit Structure. I was about to tell you that. OK. If you're working in full-blown Revit, there's a setting that will allow you to turn off structural analysis in tools. And it will go from running 30 seconds to place a window to half a second. I have Revit on this computer. So we could launch it. But no, I'm in Revit Structure. Sorry. I'm a structural engineer. But similar to that suggestion, we do have that in Revit Structure just on an individual element basis, this enable analytical instance property. And I tend to toggle that off a

15 lot in slabs and walls, one because we're not really sending them to analytical, and two, because they tend to cause some errors that really are annoying. OK. So that's a good comment. It preserves analytical behavior, but it's just turning it off per user. We're finding that if we toggle that, other people see that it's toggled off, though, the walls and the floors. OK. But yeah, it still acts-- I mean, Revit Structure, that analytical model I don't think you can really disable, which is probably good. Oh, the big R setting is user specific. OK. That's good. Yeah. OK. So the one in Revit is user specific. The one I just showed you is not. That's at least our experience with it. OK. I love this one. This is like-- I don't know. I'm getting-- I'm like mother Marcello now. I'm getting excited. So view templates came out, and it was cool. But you couldn't really do much with them. They were sort of locked down. And you were sort of stuck. And they got a little bit better. And then this came out. And what I like about this is because I'm always on everybody elses computers. And I don't want to mess with their stuff when I'm troubleshooting their problem. Why isn't my foundation showing up? So when this came out, it solved a lot of my issues. So if I go to-- let's go back up to a plan view. And perhaps you want to-- this is a printing view because it's a beautiful, beautiful plan. And we want to do a couple of things, but we don't want to mess it up, or, more importantly, we don't want to have to remember what view settings we've changed. Come down to this little button here and say Enable Temporary View Properties. Now, you don't have to have a view template associated with it. If it does, this becomes really important because everything's grayed out. You can't change it anyway. But even if you don't-- which in this case there's no view template-- it remembers where you are. And so now I can go to Visibility Graphics, turn off the walls, my little polygon walls go

16 away, sure. And then maybe I change it to fine level of detail and wireframe and whatever else you want to see. Then you come back and say, OK. I figured out the problem. I fixed it. I'm done. Restore. And it puts everything back the way it was, whether or not you had a template. So if you have a view template associated with it, it suspends it. If you don't, it just remembers where you were and then puts it back there. And then in addition, if you have to do something repetitive-- like say you're going to go to 10 different views and do the exact same 10 steps. And to do that, you need to turn off the walls and turn on wireframe and do three other things, then do what you need to do, and put it back. What you can do is make a template, a view template for it. And you can temporarily swap the templates. You could do it manually, right? You can come in and pick a new view template. My lovely view templates. OK. So I'm on two. And say, OK, well, I want to change it to here and then do what I need to do, and then change back. Well, instead, you can say, Temporarily Apply Template Properties, pick the other one, say OK, and then when you're done, say Restore. And it goes back. So you have a lot of options there. I like that one. Does everybody use that? Where you like, I never knew what that little funny looking button-- who picks these icons? Like, I don't even-- does anybody know what that is? I'm not really sure. Not that I could-- I'm an engineer. I just draw octagons and hexagons and squares. That's it. OK. So this one's good, but it's turned into more of a finger-pointing thing in our office. I didn't edit that. Yes, you did. So you can turn on these filters based on different worksharing settings. So let's go back to 3D here. So Worksharing. So say I want to know who owns what. Well, OK. That's not a good example. [INAUDIBLE] checkout. Worksets. Definitely has worksets. OK. So all of these things are on one workset. And then you can come into your display settings and say, OK. The structural workset is going to be pink because that's really appropriate. And the levels and grids are green. And then you can say check out-- so based on I own it, somebody else owns it, et cetera, or updates and changes and such. And so you can just sort of toggle these different views. And based on the color settings and the little legend, you can figure out who does what, who owns what, et cetera. And then you can see now, if you've hovered over something, you can see all that information for an individual element. And then you can prove that you weren't the one that deleted the slab. OK. So I'm going to show you guys this one, but you have to promise me that you will not use

17 it unless you absolutely have to. I You promise? I will search you out and be like, I told you not to do this. I understand the limitations of the Dimension tool. And so I'm going to show you a way to get around it. But I also am a firm believer in if it's supposed to be 10 feet, model it at 10 feet. So use with caution. And if you misuse this, I had nothing to do with it. OK. So here's what you can do. So there's a couple applications for this. We know we can go in here and override this dimension. Right? But we can't override it with another number. And we can't leave it blank. Perhaps we want to leave it blank, and then we want to have an arrow. You can do my workaround of really, really small text, and move it down close to the line. And that's usually what we do. In fact, we have a dimension style that does that and then has an arrow that comes out so we can fill it with text. But I understand that you only have so much text you can put in the dimension override. And maybe you want to put a leader in there. So instead of trying to-- putting a period. Right? This is what we do. Put a period in there. Instead of doing that, what you can do, right-click in here. Say Insert Unicode Control Character. And I like this little separator. And say OK. And it's a blank character. So now you have a blank dimension. Now, I'm not as offended by that. Don't do this, please. 24 feet. So be careful who you share this information with, as I'm saying that like-- hello, at home! Shh. Don't tell anyone! So there are limitations to the dimension tool. I understand there's times to override it. Don't abuse this, but it is there. Did people know this one? You knew this one? Were you like, don't show it! Don't show it! Don't show it! Use with caution. All right. So this one's great. What? Thank you. Go ahead. Go back? You can use an Alt code, and it will give you a blank space. So you don't even have to have a dot or a different sized text. You can just put Alt-0129, and it will give you a blank space. Alt-0129? Yeah. And then you don't need to have a really small bit of text and all that. That's good. Thanks. Because I've tried that with the right-click. It doesn't work in the text box. So Alt Come on up.

18 That also works for trying to create Oh, that's scary. Apparently it works in sheet views, too. You guys are sneaky. That one I knew. But I have a workaround for that. me. I'll tell you what it is. I made a different grid family that-- I have a workaround. me. What's up? [INAUDIBLE] not the ones on the top of your keyboard because OK. So the comment was when you use the Alt character map shortcuts, you have to use the number pad and not the numbers on the top. I'm a number pad person. I never use the numbers on top. So I've never noticed that. But that's a good tip if that's the case. OK. So we've got 12 more minutes. Let's see how many more we can get through. So I really like this one, probably because it's formulas. Surprise, surprise. But I wish it wasn't an instance property because I feel like the type property's a little bit cumbersome because you eventually get a lot of dimensions. But this is kind of cool. So I come to my other dimension here. All right. So what do we usually do for this? Right? We have a blank dimension, right? And then you put a text box over it or you override the dimension or something like that, and then you type in your text? Is that what people do? Yes? No? Everybody's just staring at me. You're like, I don't call things out like that. Well, instead of doing that-- so I have a blank dimension style. I could do that, and then I could come in here and put-- don't ignore your save warnings. You can put in a text box, which is also blank. We've been doing a lot of blank text today. Note tip. There we go. Three. Three. So this is probably what you see, right? Somebody puts a text box in here and kind of gets it in the right spot. And then you add a beam. And then you change this. And that looks like that. It has constraints because it has a formula, and it knows. So what you can do instead-- I'm just going to Undo to get back to where we were-- is instead of having the quality text, you can do a quality formula. And in the type properties, down at the bottom-- hidden where they don't want you to know about it, I guess-- you can change this equality formula. And this looks a lot

19 like a tag, if you've made any tags. So you have a couple of options-- length of segment, number of segments, number of witness lines, and total length. So you could say three equal spaces at four feet or 3 equal spaces at four feet equals 12 feet or something like that. So you can kind of string these together, ad prefixes and suffixes, and do whatever you want. And then when you update this-- I'll make it equal again-- now it says two equal spaces. So now you're not updating your text and your dimension. So I like these a lot. And then one question I get a lot is that I really don't want to see this tick mark or something like that. You can turn all those things off. So down here, you can turn off-- say I just want to see the tick mark. And you don't have that witness line in the middle. Or you can hide it all. And now it just says that. That might be a little ambiguous. So I kind of liked it better with the witness line. But you see where I'm going. Cool? Anybody using these? One person. Two people, three people, four people. That's pretty good. OK. Well, go home and play with them or on the plane on the way home. Annoy the people beside you, which I did, by the way, on the plane on the way here. I found out that the person next to me was going to AU. And I was like, oh, I'm going to AU, too. And then we got to talking. And I told her I was teaching a class. And before I know it, I have my handout out, and I was telling her all my tips and tricks. So I don't know if she enjoyed that or not. And I'm pretty sure the lawyer that was sitting next to her was not enjoying the conversation. But yes. OK. So this one came out 14? 15? Does anybody know? Select Previous? So this is something we've had in other programs, right? So I was writing this class on a weekend because that's what happens. And I love the Select Previous. So you ever do this where you go through-- and I have no idea why you would select this particular combination of elements. But sure. You select all your elements, and you're like, oh, shoot. I really need to be in 3D for this. Or you accidentally click or somebody bumps you. And you're like, I lost my selection. Well, you can right-click, Select Previous. And I'm writing this. And my husband goes, don't you know you can just go Control-left-arrow? And I was like, no. Jerk. He's probably watching. Hi. He does that to me all the time. I'm like, look at this awesome tip. And he's like, yeah. And this is a better way to do it. Here's another one of his, just to throw it in. He does some really weird stuff. Like he'll be on the phone with

20 the insurance company or something. And he'll, like, be doing this. He'll hold down Control and just hit all of the buttons. Like what does Control-L do? What does Control-T do? And then he'll right-click. So he'll select something, and then he'll right-click over here, and then right-click over here. And then he right-clicked this padlock. Who does that? And then he found this button-- Show Related. Anybody know this was here? So now you have this dialogue box that shows you what that dimension is dimensioning. It highlights it and it tells you. Who right-clicks the padlock? [LAUGHTER] I do two things with that pad-- or one thing. I click it to lock it, and I click it to unlock it. But yeah. So there's a free one courtesy of Brian. OK. This is my favorite way to copy something. And this is not a Revit thing. You can do this in other programs, too. You can select something, hold down-- I don't know why I'm in thin lines. Select something, hold down Control, and press the middle button. And-- whoops. Not the middle button. Press the left button and drag a copy right off. That one's not new? I don't hear any oohs and ahs. So everybody's like, yeah, I knew that. This one's good, but it kind of lost a little bit of its ooh and ah with 16, when Revit 16 came out. So this orient to view is good when you have a really big model, which this is not a big model. But you can get the idea. Perhaps you want to-- I do this a lot with braced frames. So I want to adjust a braced frame or move something around. And I like to work in 3D, but the braced frame's right in the middle of the building or something, which is exactly where the architect loves to have it. So you can right-click on the view cube and say Orient to View. And you can find a section or an elevation or something that you have and say, OK. Orient this view to that section. And so what it does is orients it to be looking in the same direction as the section. But then it also moves this section box, the extents of that section box to the extents of the view range or the crop region or et cetera. So now you've oriented just to what you see in that section. So you can work there. And then to undo it, what I typically do is just toggle on and off that section box, or off and on, I suppose. And you go back to the default because this is sort of a working thing. It doesn't remember its settings. So that's a little less exciting. Anybody have 16 installed yet? Does

21 anybody not-- has anybody not opened 16 yet? Oh, OK. This is going to be your tip. OK. So what you can do-- and you don't have to be in a 3D view. You can be in any view. And say you just-- I really want to see these elements in 3D. So what we usually do is select them, go back to your other view, try to figure it out. What you can do now is in 16, hit this little button. And it'll take you to-- if you have a default 3D view open, it'll take you to that view. And it will adjust your section box so that you have only what you've selected zoomed in. Right? So undo that. If you're already in the 3D view, just so we can see it a little bit better, it just snaps it like that. Let's see what it does if it's not open. I haven't tested that. It opens it. So it's going to open your default 3D view and take you right to it. Go ahead. That's a great one. So if you select this section box in the view and go to one of your other views, it'll become visible. And you can edit it. That's a great one. I wish I knew that before they had the section box. You must've been talking to my husband. He does that to me all the time. Go ahead. Great. You guys know a lot. Should have made this a panel. OK. Two and a half minutes left. All right. So these last two I'll show you at one-- or these sheets one I'll show you at once. Instead of when you move sheets from one view to another, we tend to remove them from the view and then go find them and add them back to the view. Instead of doing that, what you can do-- it's not going to let me do that. OK. So perhaps this plan that's on the second sheet, perhaps I want it on the first sheet. Instead of removing it from there, then going and finding and adding it here, what you can do is go to the sheet where you want it and just drag it, expand the sheet view and drag it right from that sheet two onto your sheet. And now I've moved it. So you save yourself some scrolling through your project browser. Then the other thing you can do with sheets is you can select-- say you have one. I don't know if you guys use-- we use little detail boxes on our details. So you have one that's all set up and everything. And you don't want to keep copying and pasting or creating new sheets. You can copy and paste an entire sheet. This works with other views, too, like schedules.

22 This is how I like to do it. There's a couple different ways. You right-click on your sheet view, say Copy to Clipboard. And then you can just click in your working view and do a Control-V or Paste from Clipboard. And let's see. I'll do it again. What I'm doing is creating more sheets. And you can do this with views on your sheets if they're not live. But then you will also duplicate all those views. So I don't know if you want to do that. But if you do, go for it. So that's the copy. The project browser is really powerful. You can select a whole-- somebody was complaining to me the other day about plotting a bunch of properties to a bunch of sheets. And like, well, just select them all at once and change at once. They're like, you can do that? Yes, you can. So you can't do everything. Not all properties are available. If you select one sheet in the project browser, and then you select another one holding down Control, you'll see some properties go away. But you can get to a lot of things. So you can select a lot of views. You can apply view templates this way for views. I'm almost there. To tab through your Windows, you can hold down Control-Tab and Control- Shift-Tab. This works in other programs. It's similar to what I've been doing this whole presentation to go through. But Control-Tab cycles through the open views. And Control-Shift- Tab goes the other way. All right. So am I allowed to go over? Or is that not allowed? OK. Well, it's coming back up now. So maybe it doesn't matter. All right, so levels-- there's just a couple more. If you guys want to leave, I won't be offended. There's a couple more I'd love to share with you guys. So here's the levels. One thing that I like to do is I like to have some top of footing levels. And what we probably don't notice in these level properties is that you can toggle these boxes over here to be a building story or not. So this is a structural level. I don't want it to really print. I just want to use it for things. So now I've toggled this property. And now I can set up a view filter based on that. So you can go into your view filters, levels, anything toggled with structural on and building story off, take it away. Put it in your view template. And now all those levels won't be on your sections. And then this was my last random list, if we had time. But we don't. There's a ton of things in the handout. You guys have contributed a lot of things. And I want to thank you for that and thank you for coming. So did you guys get at least one golden nugget? Yeah? OK.