It’s nice to hear from our customers about how they are using Ideate Software solutions to stay productive with Revit. Here’s a great tip to pass along for those who need to re-use older Revit projects, but also need to update the family content within those projects. This tip comes from Phyllis Robbins, Design Applications Manager and Associate at Eppstein Uhen Architects, Inc.
Content that has (unshared) instance parameters for things like Length or Backsplash Visibility or Mounting Height are notoriously difficult to swap for updated or different families. A swap typically means the instance parameter value reverts to the original default and we have a mess. This is a huge issue with old content, particularly since old parameters might not be named identically to newer parameters.
If we create an Ideate BIMLink export before we swap the content, we can save it with a Before suffix and open it. Next, we make the content swap in Revit. We export again (making any changes to match parameter names), saving without the suffix. We then go the Before version, grab all the values from the columns we want to match and paste it into the newest export. Save and import and all the families revert to the instance value from the original families before we made the swap.
The trick is to sort by element ID to be sure we are pasting the correct values. And, it is seriously easy to demonstrate…
Small thing but with more than 10 years of old projects we are now resurrecting for new work, it is a great solution.
Fig 1: Using Filters to simplify the task of swapping content in Revit.
Keep in mind that if you have a huge project with lots of duplicates and old stuff to swap, using Ideate BIMLink Filters is critical.
A big thanks to Phyllis Robbins, Design Applications Manager and Associate at Eppstein Uhen Architects, Inc. for sharing this valuable tip!