Ideate ReNumber, one of the tools in our IdeateApps collection, is a great tool for renumbering virtually any element in your Revit model. Whether its rooms, doors, windows, areas, you’ve probably used the tool when in a plan view.

But did you know you can also use Ideate Renumber in schedule views?

Example

In this example, I’m renumbering sheets to match the ISO 19650 UK standards.

I’ve built a custom rule using custom shared parameters for each of the different containers of the ISO 19650 UK document naming standard. The parameters are concatenated and then pushed into the Sheet number parameter to renumber the sheets. 

With the schedule view open, run the Ideate ReNumber tool. The sorting order of the schedule drives the order in which the elements are numbered, meaning the order in which the increment part is applied.

 
After the renumbering, the sheet numbers have been changed.

Bonus! 

There is also a rule to renumber details views on sheets. This rule can be loaded from our standard as delivered content.

Load the rule by clicking on Import. 

Once loaded, customize the rule to suit your company standard, then start renumbering!

Just click on the viewport to renumber them.
 

For additional training tips, check out our Training blog series

Browse our website to learn more about how Ideate Software add-on products help Revit users save time, increase model accuracy, improve deliverables and elevate design. You can give them a try by downloading trial versions or purchasing the bundle for access to the Revit plugin solutions Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, Ideate StyleManager, and IdeateApps for six months. 

About the Author

Steve Deadman - Customer Success Manager - EMEA
Steve provides support to customers and helps them get a strong return on their software investment. He has a B.Eng (Hons) degree in Mechanical Engineering and various certifications in engineering. Before joining Ideate Software, he worked at several top architectural firm in the United Kingdom where he specialized in the implementation and management of BIM processes and technology. Find Steve on LinkedIn.

Finding a bad level in your Revit model should strike fear in your heart. There are a wide variety of model conditions that might be at risk when this happens. Virtually all content placed in a Revit model has a level association. The good news is that you can follow the basic steps documented in our Ideate Explorer – How To topic to learn how to manage this type of challenge.

The basic steps are useful when you have a good level and a bad level on top of each other or when the model has not been fully developed. As the model becomes more complex, we must be more cautious when selecting and moving elements. For example, before moving any element, make sure that the base constraints with their offsets make sense and check for proper modelling. Fix that first then attempt moving the elements. E.g., Element placed at Level 1 with offset 10.’ This means that this element needs to be on Level 2 with offset 1’ given that the height of Level 1 is 9.’

If you are trying to work through the challenges of moving a complex model from one level to another, here are some detailed workflow tips on how to handle different elements categories and the order of operation:

In summary, fixing an incorrect level within a well-developed Revit model is very challenging! Hopefully these tips will provide a roadmap to help you move forward. 

Here’s a link to a related blog post, Ideate Explorer and IdeateApps: Safely Moving Revit Content to Another Level

For additional training tips, check out our Training blog series.

Browse our website to learn more about how Ideate Software add-on products help Revit users save time, increase model accuracy, improve deliverables and elevate design. You can give them a try by downloading trial versions or purchasing the bundle for access to the Revit plugin solutions Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, Ideate StyleManager, and IdeateApps for six months. 

About the Author

Nivin Nabeel, Customer Success Manager, Americas

Nivin has a background in architecture, visual arts, and computer science and has extensive experience in managing and manipulating BIM data, developing and implementing BIM standards and workflows, and applying BIM workflows to ancillary project components for improved efficiency. Before joining Ideate Software, Nivin worked at several architecture and design firms where she learned about Ideate Software products, used them, advocated for them, implemented them, and trained others on how to use them. She earned her Bachelor of Architectural Science degree from Toronto Metropolitan University. Follow Nivin on LinkedIn.

Failure to manage the health of your Revit project could result in poor performance, slow synchronization times, and model crashes, which can lead to delays, file corruption, and missed deadlines.

Keeping your Revit model healthy is essential to any successful project. A healthy model will prevent crashes from happening, ensure all the correct data is contained within the model, and be efficient and productive to work on.

Using Ideate BIMLink, you can set up a comprehensive Revit model health check and publish to a single Excel file with relevant information about the health of the selected Revit model.

How can I use Ideate BIMLink to perform a health check?

Ideate BIMLink is delivered with many health check link definitions that can be exported from the Revit model. Each link can be exported to the same Excel file to build a comprehensive health check.

Health check link definitions that ship with Ideate BIMLink.

Each link definition has a description to show exactly what the link contains.

The link definitions can be exported one by one to the same Excel file.

The resulting Excel file has a separate tab for each exported Ideate BIMLink health check link definition.

Once the Excel has been created, it can be formatted using Pivot tables and macros to display the information more efficiently. Or the data can be pushed into Power BI to create a more visual interpretation.

For more details see the Help file.

Ideate Automation

If you need to create health check reports on a regular basis, the process can be automated by using Ideate Automation. For more information see our Ideate Automation webpage and our Help file, How to Create a Health Check Report with Ideate Automation.

For additional training tips, check out our Training blog series

Browse our website to learn more about how Ideate Software add-on products help Revit users save time, increase model accuracy, improve deliverables and elevate design. You can give them a try by downloading trial versions or purchasing the bundle for access to the Revit plugin solutions Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, Ideate StyleManager, and IdeateApps for six months. 

About the Author

Steve Deadman - Customer Success Manager - EMEA
Steve provides support to customers and helps them get a strong return on their software investment. He has a B.Eng (Hons) degree in Mechanical Engineering and various certifications in engineering. Before joining Ideate Software, he worked at several top architectural firm in the United Kingdom where he specialized in the implementation and management of BIM processes and technology. Find Steve on LinkedIn.

At Ideate Software, we like to provide a wealth of support to our customers, either via our website, which has a ton of useful information, or within our products. For example, Ideate BIMLink ships with a great extent of preconfigured content; you get more than 350 predefined link definitions to help you get up and running as soon as possible.

All the content provided within Ideate BIMLink is displayed as shown below and can be manually imported as needed into the Revit project.

The Ideate BIMLink content is saved and loaded from this folder C:\ProgramData\Ideate\Ideate BIMLink\en-US\Samples

You might not be aware, but you can also load additional content for some of our other applications too, for example, Ideate ViewCreator, one of the tools in the IdeateApps collection.

Start from the settings cog and select Manage View Rules.

You can also import additional Room rules.

From here you can choose to import additional rules into your projects to help with your workflows. 

You can also Export custon rules from this dialog, for wider use within your company.

This opens a folder where you can load the additional rules that ship with Ideate ViewCreator. The default folder shown below, called Basic Rules, contains the list of rules that automatically import into any new Revit project where Ideate ViewCreator has been previously used.

Lots of additional content is available.

If that wasn’t enough, there is also a Bonus Rules folder! My favorite bonus rule within Ideate ViewCreator is the one called “DUPLICATE - Phase New.” This rule can be used to copy existing views to make '-New' views. Newly created views have a hard-wired Phase and Phase Filter override.

Bonus time!

For more information see our Help file on this topic.

Additional content is also available for Ideate ReNumber, another tool within the IdeateApps collection. See more in our Help file.  

Our European and UK customers might find the bonus rule called “Sheets - BS ISO 19650.rule” particularly valuable. This rule is designed to work with customer parameters within a title block as described in my earlier blog post, Renaming Sheets to ISO 19650.

For additional training tips, check out our Training blog series

Browse our website to learn more about how Ideate Software add-on products help Revit users save time, increase model accuracy, improve deliverables and elevate design. You can give them a try by downloading trial versions or purchasing the bundle for access to the Revit plugin solutions Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, Ideate StyleManager, and IdeateApps for six months. 

About the Author

Steve Deadman - Customer Success Manager - EMEA
Steve provides support to customers and helps them get a strong return on their software investment. He has a B.Eng (Hons) degree in Mechanical Engineering and various certifications in engineering. Before joining Ideate Software, he worked at several top architectural firm in the United Kingdom where he specialized in the implementation and management of BIM processes and technology. Find Steve on LinkedIn.

Ideate BIMLink can be utilized to batch rename and renumber sheets in your Revit project. The Revit interface has limitations in terms of editing large amount of data. Ideate BIMLink allows you to edit model data by exporting it to Excel and pushing it back into Revit. The basic steps for this process are covered in our Help topic: How to Batch Rename or Renumber Sheets.

If you need to tackle some more complex challenges, in this blog post I’ll highlight the power of Excel functions and formulas when utilizing Ideate BIMLink for sheet renumbering.

Here is an example:  

1. Utilize the adjacent column to enter the following formula, then drag down to autofill the values.
   
   =LEFT(A1,1)&"."&TEXT((RIGHT(A1,3)+10),"000")
   
   List of Excel functions utilized in this function:
    

   =LEFT(text,[num_char])	Returns the specified number of characters to the start of a text string
   =RIGHT(text,[num_char])	Returns the specified number of characters to the end of a text string
   &	Operator to concatenate string data by merging and combining
   “ ”	Converting operators, numbers or symbols into string
   +	Addition
   =TEXT(value,format_text)	Converts value into text into a specific number format

2. Copy the resulting information from column B and use the Paste Special>Values function to move the data back into Sheet Number column, save Excel, and import it back into Revit via Ideate BIMLink.
   
   
   
   This is the result: 
   
   

   
For additional training tips, check out our Training blog series.

Browse our website to learn more about how Ideate Software add-on products help Revit users save time, increase model accuracy, improve deliverables and elevate design. You can give them a try by downloading trial versions or purchasing the bundle for access to the Revit plugin solutions Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, Ideate StyleManager, and IdeateApps for six months. 

About the Author

Nivin Nabeel, Customer Success Manager, Americas

Nivin has a background in architecture, visual arts, and computer science and has extensive experience in managing and manipulating BIM data, developing and implementing BIM standards and workflows, and applying BIM workflows to ancillary project components for improved efficiency. Before joining Ideate Software, Nivin worked at several architecture and design firms where she learned about Ideate Software products, used them, advocated for them, implemented them, and trained others on how to use them. She earned her Bachelor of Architectural Science degree from Toronto Metropolitan University. Follow Nivin on LinkedIn.