December

28

2021

We are continuing our monthly Ideate Software blog series entitled Wishlist Granted.  Each blog article features real user requests from Autodesk forums and discussions, plus many Ideate Software customer requests.

The holiday gift-giving season came a little early for Ideate Software. In fact, it was in November 2021. That’s when we released the latest update to IdeateApps, our productivity and efficiency collection of tools for Revit. Just one of the many enhancements within the latest release is the ability to create a whole collection of new views based on any series of rooms.

  • This is an interesting request on the Revit Ideas page to create a series of views based on a room with just one click.
  • This is a related request on the Revit Ideas page to make the elevations “Room Aware,” meaning they would automatically know their orientation such as South or North.
  • In addition this request is also related, requesting the ability to create multiple sheets.

We’ve synthesized these and several other forum requests into the new Ideate ViewCreator Room Views method. The Room Views Method is used to expedite the batch creation of Revit views, and optionally sheets, that are room-based. 


Ideate ViewCreator has four methods for creating new views. The Room Views is the newest option.

After you select the desired room or rooms, there are two layout options available as shown below. The choice here will impact whether or not the newly created views will also be placed on a sheet. You can learn more about the Room Rule or Clone Sheet layouts in this online help topic: Room View Layout Options.

 
You can choose a layout option that uses a Room Rule or choose an option that allows you to clone an existing sheet.

You can then preview and create the new views and sheets. Ideate ViewCreator Room View method will allow you to:

  • Batch create many elevation views that are named per the room name, number and orientation
  • Place the newly created views on a sheet
  • Batch create many enlarged floor and/or ceiling plans per room
  • Batch create sheets with elevations, enlarged plan, 3D view and ceiling plan per each selected room

Here is a simple example of a toilet room with elevations, enlarged plan, enlarged reflected ceiling plan, and 3D view automatically created, named correctly based on the room orientation, and then placed on the Revit sheet.

All these features come together better than the Academy Award winning 1985 movie, A Room with a View! Did we stay up late and watch the British movie for some of our inspiration? We’ll never tell!

Try if for yourself with our fully functional trial version. You can start a trial by downloading IdeateApps.

At Ideate Software, we are focused on delighting our customers. With Ideate Software there is no need to wait for future Revit releases to see your idea turned into a reality.

We love ideas from Revit users – feel free to contact our team via [email protected] to share yours.

Wishlist Granted!

Please review our other Wishlist Granted posts.


About the Author

Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist 
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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November

15

2021

We are continuing our monthly Ideate Software blog series entitled Wishlist Granted. Each blog article features real user requests from Autodesk forums and discussions plus many Ideate Software customer requests.

Warren Buffet, a fellow Nebraskan once wrote:

“Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.”

When you delete something in Revit, you are taking a certain amount of risk. Is Revit telling you truly everything that will be deleted? There are many complex relationships within the Revit model, and it’s not always intuitive to understand how a simple removal of a floor element might impact many other related elements.

For many years, Revit had no additional warnings if you deleted a level. In Revit 2019, Autodesk introduced an added pop-up warning that would show elements that would be removed if you deleted a level. This enhancement was a direct response to this Revit Ideas Forum Request.


The Revit Delete Warning dialog, available for level deletion only. 

However, the Autodesk implementation only addressed part of the problem. The pop-up warning is only for Revit levels. There are still many requests for additional features such as this one from a good Ideate Software customer:

David Plumb of BWBR writes a request to be able to expand and collapse the different categories of elements to be deleted. This important summary data makes it much easier to understand and browse the relevant changes before they happen.

This is just one of the many reasons Ideate Software developed Ideate SmartDelete. Ideate SmartDelete is part of the IdeateApps collection, a set of nine tools we developed to streamline activities that daily Revit users perform most often.

Ideate SmartDelete
 
Ideate SmartDelete allows you to expand and collapse all the information about a level deletion in Revit.

In addition, the Autodesk Revit delete pop-up warning only appears when deleting levels. What about the hundreds of other relationships that you may not be aware exist within your Revit model?

Ideate SmartDeleteHere is an example selecting a floor element and Ideate SmartDelete is reporting that there is an Element Keynote attached to that floor that will indeed be removed if you delete the floor. This is certainly not always known. How many times have text, dimensions, keynotes, or other elements gone missing and nobody knows why?

Review this video to learn more about how Ideate SmartDelete can reduce your liability issues.   Plus, our IdeateApps online Help topic has detailed information on Ideate SmartDelete as well as a Getting Started Guide.

Arm yourself with the knowledge to mitigate any risk!

We love ideas from Revit users. Feel free to contact our team via [email protected] to share yours.

Wishlist Granted!

Please review our other Wishlist Granted posts.


About the Author

Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist 
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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October

13

2021

We are continuing our monthly Ideate Software Blog series entitled Wishlist Granted.  Each blog article features real user requests from Autodesk forums and discussions, plus many Ideate Software customer requests.

First, it’s important to have the most efficient Revit model possible. Elements that aren’t used can negatively impact Revit model performance. That’s a huge reason Autodesk developed the Purge Unused command within Revit. A page directly from the Autodesk Revit Help file states:

“Remove unused views, families, and other objects from the project to improve performance and reduce file size.”

However, Purge Unused doesn’t remove many styles that may be used within the Revit model. A Revit Ideas Forum request by Matthew Taylor at WSP is a perfect example of the problem, and the perfect summary for the following features requested by Matthew:

  • Purge unused Fill Patterns
  • Purge unused Line Patterns
  • Purge unused Line Styles (and by association, this includes CAD import layers)
  • Purge unused Subcategories

Manually purging these elements out of families is labor intensive

For this reason and many others, we developed Ideate StyleManager.   

Use Ideate StyleManager to:

  • Safely delete styles that otherwise cannot be deleted or purged in Revit software 
  • Merge non-standard styles into standard styles 
  • Forensically analyze the usage of all styles to understand the true scope of a modification
  • Clean up Object Styles, Line Styles, Line Patterns, Fill Patterns, Filled Regions, Materials, Material Appearance Assets, View Filters, View Templates, Viewports, Scope Boxes, Text, Fonts, Dimensions, and Arrowheads
  • Understand which views are using which View Filters

Ideate StyleManager 
Main Ideate StyleManager dialog showing the merge and purge of non-standard and duplicate styles into standard styles. We are merging all the Families, Materials and Elements that have “Dense Sand” to instead have “Sand - Dense” while at the same time deleting the “Dense Sand” definition from the Revit model.

There are at least a half dozen requests on the Revit Ideas Forum for managing all these different Revit Styles with an easier method. 

We love ideas from Revit users – feel free to contact our team via [email protected] to share yours.

Wishlist Granted!

Please review our other Wishlist Granted posts.


About the Author

Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist 
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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September

17

2021

We are continuing our monthly Ideate Software blog series entitled Wishlist Granted. Each blog article features real user requests from Autodesk forums and discussions as well as from Ideate Software customers.

Today, we are looking at additional Revit Sheet and View Management requests. One of the top Revit Ideas is to have more control on the placement of Revit Views on Sheets. It has 897 votes and counting!  Back in 2016, Purvi Irwin logged the idea with these important details:

More Control Over View Placement on Sheets
Guide Grids are not the most easy to use and useful tool in Revit. It would be much better if view titles and views could snap to reference planes, or some other "non plot" element within a sheet border. I hate to say it, but AutoCAD does this better. Are you going to let AutoCAD be better than you, Revit?!

Ideate Align, Ideate SheetManager and Ideate Clone, three of the tools in our IdeateApps collection, have several features designed to ensure your views are organized within your sheet set in a way that is both logical and easy to use. One improvement we recently made to this process is the ability to also control the view title. This feature is available in Revit 2022 only due to API limitations in the older versions, but it really makes our tools shine.

In the image below, you’ll see that the views on the selected sheets can now be aligned with the sheet on the left while at the same time allowing you the option to align the view titles. We will, of course, also match the view title length at the same time.  

(Click image to enlarge)

Revit Views of Sheets
IdeateApps> Align for Revit 2022 elegantly handles view title placement and line length as part of the alignment process

You can learn about this and other view placement features in IdeateApps in the What’s New in IdeateApps video.

For more information on how to align view titles, please review this topic: Help: How to Align View Titles (2022)

At Ideate Software, we are focused on delighting our customers. With Ideate Software there is no need to wait for future Revit releases to see your idea turned into a reality.

Wishlist Granted!

Please review our other Wishlist Granted posts.


About the Author

Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist 
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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August

16

2021

We are continuing our Ideate Software blog series entitled Wishlist Granted. Each blog article features real user requests and our response to those requests. Let’s chehk to see what we can uncuver

While the out-of-the-box Revit includes a Spell Check option, it ONLY checks the current view or sheet for a very limited subset of text within the view.  Here is the spellcheck description pulled from the Autodesk Revit Help pages:

“The Check Spelling tool checks the spelling of text notes in a selection or in the current view or sheet. This tool does not check the spelling of other types of text, such as text in element properties.”

There are several Revit Ideas Requests for checking spelling within a Revit Schedule on the Revit Ideas Forum. Please review this request for a Spell Check within Tables that has an Ideate Software customer singing our praises from three years ago!

A Revit Schedule can contain a list of Sheets, View Names, Rooms, and many other types of elements that would be easily accessible if we can check the spelling of a Revit Schedule. Wouldn’t that be nice?

In addition to just the current View or Sheet, there is the request to Spell Check all Open Sheets and Views or all Sheets within a Sheet list.

Well, my dear friends, we have developed Ideate SpellCheck to solve ALL these requests and MORE. Ideate SpellCheck is part of the IdeateApps collection of productivity tools for ALL Revit users. Ideate SpellCheck:

  • Checks all Sheets at once
  • Checks Schedule data or Keynote Legends
  • Zooms to review Sheet-based errors
  • Checks in all languages that are Revit-supported languages
  • Supports additional languages
  • Reports on errors that exist, but need to be fixed later (groups, keynotes, worksharing, nested families, etc.)
  • Provides a comprehensive report of changes made or words added to the dictionary

Spellcheck options 
Ideate SpellCheck allows many different options for reviewing Revit views and sheets.

spellcheck main menu 
Ideate SpellCheck’s main dialog showing the user a wealth of options

Please review our online HELP topic for Frequently Asked Questions concerning Ideate SpellCheck. Here is an easy chart to review the feature set in basic Revit vs. Ideate SpellCheck.

Recently, somebody asked me if we can check text within the Keynote file. The answer is YES, but you will need to edit the keynote.txt file manually to make the changes. Ideate SpellCheck will alert you of the misspelling.

Keynote-legend
Ideate SpellCheck reviewing text in Keynote Legends

Your drawings and deliverables are your reputation! Don’t send out misspellings when there is an easy and powerful solution within IdeateApps!

At Ideate Software, we are focused on delighting our customers. With Ideate Software there is no need to wait for future Revit releases to see your idea turned into a reality. We have the capabilities right now.

Wishlist Granted!

Please review our other Wishlist Granted posts.


About the Author

Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist 
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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