October

8

2019

Recently, when looking into establishing a method of revision management for Revit models, Paul Cook, a Civil 3D, BIM & CAD Technician at Jacobs, learned about a limitation within Revit: you can’t view the revision history of each sheet in schedule form. 

Because of past success with Ideate Software tools, Paul looked to us for a solution. Starting with the Help page on managing Revit sheet-based revisions, Paul found that Ideate BIMLink enables the creation of a document issuance record, and that Ideate Software offers an Excel Macro template and dataset free-of-charge to customers. He reached out to the Support Team for details.

Jan Sako, Support Manager, sent Paul the information as well as links to short how-to videos that demonstrate how to use Ideate BIMLink to quickly and accurately update all sheets with the proper revision or sheet issuance information at one time.

The information was what Paul was looking for, and some customization was needed, because Jacobs uses an alphanumeric revision number that shows on sheets, in place of the Sequence number, that they have assigned to the ‘Issued To’ parameter to represent the Revision Number.

Paul reached out to the Ideate Software Support Team again, and this time connected with Glynnis Patterson, Director of Software Development. She offered a few suggestions that weren’t quite right, but they sparked some thoughts in Paul.

“I managed to achieve what I was after by using Excel formulas on a new tab to recreate the register. It’s basically a clone of the DIR tab using cell links, except that where an issue is shown on the ‘DIR’ tab, it searches for the ‘Issued To’ entry for that sequence number and reports that instead of the issue count.” 

“I appreciate how responsive the Ideate Software Support team was and how flexible Ideate Software tools are,” said Paul. “I’ve already thought of other ways to customize the spreadsheet, and I know that if I have any trouble, I can give Ideate Software a call.”

Get more details in the full story.

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