While designing structures to be safe and stable, structural engineers deal with large models that contain detailed elements. Managing the details of elements in Revit can be tedious, time consuming and risky if they are not properly coordinated. Use Ideate BIMLink instead, and you can pull the Revit data into Excel, easily make changes, quickly verify the accuracy of the updates, and push it all back into Revit within just minutes. 

Tasks: Data Extractions/Imports and Level and Grid Comparisons

Learn More

We have several resources available online that can help you get the most out of Ideate BIMLink:

• Blog Post: Get the Revit XYZ Data You Need
• Help File: Sending Coordinate Data for Revit Modeling to the Field
• Help File Integrate Revit Coordinate Properties
• 15-minute Video: Coordinate Data for Virtual Design and Construction

Similar Posts

This post is the eighth in a series related to the results of our survey of architecture, engineering, construction, and building-owner companies. Our previous posts covered the time savings possible by using Ideate BIMLink to:

1. Manage Revit sheets 
2. Create and modify rooms and areas
3. Swap structural framing instances
4. Coordinate spaces & rooms and audit & fix device elevation
5. Compile quantity takeoffs, assign assembly codes, and swap types
6. View and revise tasks
7. QA/QC doors, hardware, and other elements

Keep an eye out for our next blog post, which will cover coordinating survey data and height data for virtual design and construction usage. And check out our Ideate BIMLink ROI web page, where we separated the time savings data by discipline.

Contact us if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you. 

Visit our website for more information on our Revit productivity tools. Give them a try with a free trial version, or subscribe today. 

About the Author

Sash Kazeminejad - AIA, LEED AP - Customer Success Manager
Sash earned his Master of Architecture from Montana State University and is a California registered architect, LEED Accredited Professional. He has extensive experience in project management; BIM management; design for architectural firms in California, Montana, and Oregon; and leading classroom and online BIM training. He provides consulting, sales, support, and training solutions to AECO customers around the globe. Find Sash on LinkedIn.

For some large architectural and interior design firms, the need to schedule and tag room location information, such as room name and room number as part of their furniture, fixtures, and equipment (FF&E) package, is essential to their workflows. While this workflow generally works for projects that use the same Revit model for both core/shell and FF&E, getting Revit to report the room location of FF&E items, where the rooms are associated with a linked Revit model, will not work. This is because Revit is unable to schedule the location of FF&E items when the rooms are not in the same model as the FF&E. 

Common Workaround

A common workaround for this workflow is to create custom shared parameters for the room information and associate those parameters to Revit categories that are associated with FF&E, such as furniture, furniture systems, lighting fixtures, and more. The shared parameter creation process is very straightforward, but gathering the room location information to input into the custom shared parameters is a manual process that can be painful, especially if there are thousands of FF&E items.

A Better Solution: Use Ideate BIMLink

Thankfully, we can easily gather the room location information for FF&E using Ideate BIMLink and push those values into custom shared parameters for the purpose of scheduling and tagging. A process that once took hours or days to complete can now be accomplished in minutes.

Step-by-Step Instructions

The process for this workflow would look something like this:

1. Create custom Shared Parameters for Room Name and Room Number.
2. Create custom Tags that include data such as Mark or Type Mark and the custom Room Name and Room Number Parameters.
3. Add the custom Project Shared Parameters to your Revit templates and projects and map those Parameters to the appropriate FF&E categories (Furniture, Furniture Systems, Lighting Fixtures, etc.)
4. Create a Quality Control (QC) Schedule using Revit’s Multi-Category Schedule option that lists all of your FF&E items. Consider filtering your Schedule to only show items that are part of the FF&E package. In addition, add your custom Project-Shared Parameters for the Room Name and Room Number and add the native Room: Name and Room: Number Parameters as well. These values will be blank in your Schedule, especially if the rooms for the FF&E are part of a linked Revit model, such as the core and shell file.
5. Using Ideate BIMLink, create a new link from your QC Schedule, which will automatically build a list of the Parameter data you want to export to Excel. You should notice that Ideate BIMLink displays values for the Room: Name and Room: Number Parameters. Revit does not display this.
6. Once the link has been created in Ideate BIMLink, you can export that data to Excel and copy the relevant data from the Room: Name and Room: Number Parameters over to the custom Room Name and Room Number Parameters.
7. Save the results and import the data back in using Ideate BIMLink. Your custom Parameters should now have the values displayed in the QC Schedules, the Tags themselves (if you tagged your FF&E), and in the Properties palette of the selected elements.

It is important to note that while this blog post focuses on gathering linked Room data to push into custom Room parameters for FF&E, the process of gathering data to push into custom parameters works for many other categories.

To learn more about this process, be sure to watch this video.

 For related blog posts and videos, be sure to check out:

•    Similar Blog Post: Using Ideate BIMLink to Push To & From Room Data into Door Tags
•    Webinar Recording: Parameter Primer Part 1
•    Webinar Recording: Parameter Primer Part 2

Visit our website for more information on our Revit productivity tools. Give them a try with a free trial version, or subscribe today. 

About the Author

Sash Kazeminejad - AIA, LEED AP - Customer Success Manager
Sash earned his Master of Architecture from Montana State University and is a California registered architect, LEED Accredited Professional. He has extensive experience in project management; BIM management; design for architectural firms in California, Montana, and Oregon; and leading classroom and online BIM training. He provides consulting, sales, support, and training solutions to AECO customers around the globe. Find Sash on LinkedIn.

Architects, engineers and interior designers who use Revit software can save a significant amount of time by using Ideate BIMLink for quality control tasks. No longer will you have to check elements one by one. Instead, you can pull all the data from the Revit file into Excel, easily review it and make corrections, and then push it all back into Revit to instantly update your model.   

Tasks: Quality Control

Learn More

We have several resources available online that can help you get the most out of Ideate BIMLink:

• Blog Post – Check Your Fire Ratings
• Help File – Update Revit Door Schedules
• Help File – Edit Revit Key Schedule Data
• Help File – Who Did That? 
• Four-minute Video – Hardware Key Schedule

Similar Posts

This post is the seventh in a series related to the results of our survey of architecture, engineering, construction, and building-owner companies. Our previous posts covered the time savings possible by using Ideate BIMLink to:

• Manage Revit sheets 
• Create and modify rooms and areas
• Swap structural framing instances
• Coordinate spaces & rooms and audit & fix device elevation
• Compile quantity takeoffs, assign assembly codes, and swap types
• View and revise tasks

Keep an eye out for our next blog post, which will cover extracting coordinate data as well as comparing levels and grids. And check out our Ideate BIMLink ROI web page, where we separated the ROI data by discipline.

Contact us if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you. 

Visit our website for more information on our Revit productivity tools. Give them a try with a free trial version, or subscribe today. 

About the Author

Sash Kazeminejad - AIA, LEED AP - Customer Success Manager
Sash earned his Master of Architecture from Montana State University and is a California registered architect, LEED Accredited Professional. He has extensive experience in project management; BIM management; design for architectural firms in California, Montana, and Oregon; and leading classroom and online BIM training. He provides consulting, sales, support, and training solutions to AECO customers around the globe. Find Sash on LinkedIn.

Revit software includes a basic tool that allow users to create MEP Spaces from Architectural Rooms. These rooms are typically contained within a Revit linked model. However, this built-in automatic space creation tool is quite limited and not very customizable.

The Solution: Ideate BIMLink 

Using Ideate BIMLink, you can easily create hundreds of spaces from rooms on different levels, all at the same time. You can also modify the space naming and space numbering at the same time to match your project standards. Plus, you can review and share ANY room-based property into the relevant space-based property.

Workflow Overview

Ideate BIMLink is delivered with two library link definitions to make quick work of this process.

Browse to the Ideate BIMLink library links named Rooms-to-Spaces and Rooms-to-Spaces_CREATE and modify the properties to meet your specific needs. Export both link definitions to the SAME spreadsheet, and then copy the needed Room information from the Room-to-Spaces worksheet tab over to the Rooms-to-Spaces_CREATE worksheet tab. Fill out column A (Element ID) with the word NEW, and then import the Rooms-to-Spaces_Create worksheet tab back into Revit via Ideate BIMLink. Copying the same coordinate information from the Room locations will allow Ideate BIMLink to create placed Spaces in the same location. Both models must be using the SAME coordinate system.

To learn more about this process, be sure to watch this video.

Visit our website for more information on our Revit productivity tools. Give them a try with a free trial version, or subscribe today. 

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.

San Francisco, CA, June 16, 2020 – Ideate Software, a veteran Autodesk Developer Network member, announced enhancements to its Revit productivity applications.

“As we do every year, we launched updates to all our products shortly after Autodesk released its newest version of Revit software,” said Glynnis Patterson, Director of Software Development. “In addition to aligning our software with Revit 2021, we added enhancements requested by Revit users around the world. One of the most significant changes is within Ideate Sticky, which has always enabled users to link Excel spreadsheets into their Revit projects. With our latest version, users can also link Microsoft Word and PDF documents—even multi-paged PDF documents—into their Revit projects.”

Below are highlights. Click on the links for more details: 

• The new version of Ideate Sticky now offers: 
  • Support for PDF and Word documents
  • The ability to mass-edit Sticky properties
  • The option to link Excel files into Revit projects as images when greater visual fidelity is needed
     
• The new version of Ideate StyleManager includes:
  • Improved usage results for families containing older CAD imports object styles
  • Hatch patterns displayed on the Fill Pattern dialog
  • Filled and masking regions renamed from "Detail items" within usage results of the user interface to better indicate their status
     
• The new version of Ideate BIMLink has the following enhancements:
  • MEP — Create spaces from linked room data 
  • Structure — New data category: Sketch
  • New quality control workflows with additional properties available:
    • Walls: Has Edited Profile and Has Split face
    • Roofs, Ceilings, Floors: Has Split Face
    • Walls, 2021 Only: Cross Section
    • Walls, 2021 Only: Angle from Vertical
  • New Health Check Folder within Library Links
     
• The new version of Ideate Explorer now offers:
  • Support for new Revit 2021 elements including Direct Shapes and linked PDFs
  • New features in the Ideate Query component:
    • All quality control properties added to Ideate BIMLink also available within Ideate Query
    • Review survey or internal coordinate data for all model elements
  • Support for deployment of company standards in the Warnings Manager component
     
• The new version of IdeateApps includes the following improvements: 
  • Ideate QuickSelect supports new Revit 2021 elements 
  • Ideate QuickSelect supports the new Ideate Sticky images
  • Improved support for deployment of company standards for Ideate ReNumber and Ideate ViewCreator content

Those who already subscribe to Ideate Software solutions have access to the current Revit-compatible version (2021) plus three earlier versions (2020-2018), as well as access to point release improvements made during the subscription period. Those who aren’t subscribers yet can download 14-day trial versions from the Ideate Software website or purchase the $500 bundle that gives them access to all the solutions for 6 months.
 

About Ideate Software
Ideate Software an Autodesk^® AEC Industry Partner and Autodesk^® Authorized Developer, empowers Revit users to gain unprecedented control over their data. Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, IdeateApps, and Ideate StyleManager were all developed to solve persistent problems in architecture, engineering, and construction, and owner (AECO) workflows. Ideate Software solutions enable Revit users to save time, increase accuracy, improve project deliverables, and elevate design.

Autodesk, the Autodesk logo, ATC, and Revit are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries.

Microsoft Excel is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other brand names, product names or trademarks belong to their respective holders.

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