Microsoft’s Power BI is a business analytics tool and service that is popular with Ideate Software customers. In our post last week, we demonstrated one example of connecting user-data from Ideate BIMLink. Once you’ve built a report or dashboard, you’ll probably want to share it with co-workers or with others external to your organization.

Your collaboration and sharing experience will be different based on the level of Power BI account you and your recipient each have. To distill the extensive and sometimes contradictory information found online, we offer the following table of options available for Power BI content. The table generally moves from the most cost and control at the top to the least cost, interactivity, and control at the bottom.

These are the different account levels considered in the table. Every step up in account level allows the affordances of the levels beneath it:

• No Power BI Account
• Power BI Free Account
• Power BI Pro Account with no purchase of capacity, meaning Shared Capacity is used
• Power BI Pro Account with organizational purchase of Premium Capacity
• Power BI Pro Account with organizational purchase of Power BI Embedded from Azure

Note: App Workspaces are in the process of being updated, and the sharing options will be affected. The new App Workspaces are in preview mode and currently allow assigning member roles: Admin, Member, and Contributor. A read-only Viewer role is also in the works. Note that you can have finer control over who can see what data by using Row-level security.

Learn more here:

• How should I collaborate and share in Power BI?
• Share your Power BI dashboards and reports with coworkers and others
• Create the new workspaces (preview) in Power BI
• Publish apps with dashboards and reports in Power BI
• Power BI Premium – what is it?
• Power BI Free vs Pro

About the Author

Stephanie Fitzgerald – Software Developer
Stephanie earned her Ed.M. in Technology, Innovation, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from University of Oregon. She also gained a certificate in Advanced Full-Stack JavaScript from Alchemy Code Lab in Portland, OR. In past roles, Stephanie wrote C# and web design curriculum for Zaniac, where she was also the project manager for development, managed a research study of student motivation to learn math for Harvard University, and redesigned the website for a Tufts University library. As a student, she built a social network site for athletes, a back-end security package, and a tablet game app for the California Science Center.

We constantly hear, “I want to know who did that, and when” from all our customers, in all countries, and across all disciplines in the building design industry. It’s the blessing and the curse of a parametric building information model (such as that delivered by Autodesk Revit): a change in one place percolates throughout the model, and quite often those side effects are not apparent at the time of the change.

So, this data forensics ambition is understandable.

To accommodate this long-standing request, we’ve added both “Created by” and “Last Updated by” to our Ideate BIMLink data model. You can find this as part of our quality control built-in sample links called “QC-MC-WhoDidThis”.

I asked our software developer Stephanie Fitzgerald, who has been reviewing Power BI for us, to help with a visualization of this data. Using the data from Ideate BIMLink and Power BI, we were quickly able to investigate the contribution per team member to both the creation and modification of the Revit model elements for two linked files that are part of the same project.

Through Power BI, it’s easy to take our BIMLink data and use a slicer to analyze just the Level and Grid elements.

I was alarmed to see that the mysteriously named “Employee2” has been modifying these critical building datum elements; now that’s an actionable piece of data!

Within Ideate BIMLink, we strive to highlight essential pieces of the Revit database for your use by building our Quality Control (QC) sample links. Using this data in conjunction with tools such as Power BI extends this value by making it easy to spot the outliers. You can test drive this new data by downloading the latest version of Ideate BIMLink and using the Sample Link, as shown below.

Now it’s time to go and have a chat with Employee 2.

About the Author

Glynnis Patterson, NCARB – Director of Software Development
Glynnis is a registered architect and has worked within the building information modeling (BIM) industry since 1998. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, she has worked as an architect, educator and construction site manager. Glynnis is the Director of Software Development Services and continues to work with AECO clients worldwide, developing, and consulting on solutions to BIM challenges. In her spare time, Glynnis volunteers for the local high school and with growitgreenmorristown.org. Find Glynnis on LinkedIn.

Ideate BIMLink comes with a huge variety of sample link definition files to help you make the most of the software immediately. One set of sample link definitions is for quality control. In that sample link folder, you’ll find templates for a variety of tasks. “QC” in the link definition title means “Quality Control.” “MC” in the title means “Multiple Categories.”  

Each sample link definition also includes a brief description explaining the use. Be sure to review these descriptions for important information about each defined workflow.

The Perfect Tool for Cleaning and Managing your Revit Model

Here are three examples of how you can use Ideate BIMLink to streamline the quality control process:

1. Audit names for BIM protocol standards – Many building codes or owner requirements reference COBie or other BIM protocol naming standards that include rules on how the model elements, rooms, and spaces should be named, and often the names cannot include spaces. You can use the out-of-the-box sample link in Ideate BIMLink to find elements that have spaces in the names and then easily remove those spaces.
2. Manage duplicate type marks – One of the most common Revit warnings relates to duplicate type marks. Most databases, as well as COBie, require that type marks be unique. By removing duplicates, you improve file performance and follow good database protocol. This can be accomplished with the sample link called "QC-MC-Duplicate_Marks_Type" that comes with Ideate BIMLink.
3. Audit Revit room and space data related to view references – For interior elevation views, the ability to report on the room or space data means that the view name can be easily correlated to the room/space number and name. The simplest way to audit the interior elevation is to use the sample link that comes with Ideate BIMLink called "QC-Views_Interior-Audit."

For more information on each of these workflows, read the related help file.  

For implementation services or to learn more about how Ideate BIMLink can help your business, please contact sales@ideatesoftware.com.

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 18 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.

Ideate BIMLink and Ideate Sticky are two powerful Ideate solutions that connect Autodesk Revit software and Microsoft Excel:

• Ideate BIMLink: Pull information from a Revit file into Excel for editing
• Ideate Sticky: Display non-BIM data from an Excel worksheet in a Revit project

Using Ideate BIMLink and Ideate Sticky Together 

 
Many workflows can be enhanced by extracting data from Revit with Ideate BIMLink, reformatting it in Excel, and then displaying that formatted data in Revit projects using Ideate Sticky. Here are two examples:

1. Document Issue Records – Revision data can be exported from the Revit project via Ideate BIMLink and reorganized in a matrix format in Excel. This matrix data can be linked into Revit via Ideate Sticky to be displayed on a Sheet. Watch the YouTube video, Ideate BIMLink - Document Issue and Revision Records.
2. Plumbing Fixture Counts or Occupancy Summaries – For plumbing calculations with conditional statements to be applied only to subtotaled data, raw data can be exported via Ideate BIMLink, subtotals can be calculated and formatted in alignment with code requirements in Excel, and the formatted data can be linked to Revit via Ideate Sticky.  

For more information on each of these workflows, visit the related Help page. 

For implementation services or to learn more about how Ideate BIMLink and Ideate Sticky can help your business, please contact sales@ideatesoftware.com.

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 18 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.

Revit software enables some revision capabilities. Ideate BIMLink and Ideate Sticky take over where Revit leaves off.

• Do you need revisions that aren’t in Revision Clouds to appear in the Titleblock?
  If yes, in Revit you must update the “Revision on Sheet” option within each sheet view.
• Do you need a schedule of all revisions on each sheet?
  If yes, chances are that you have created a workaround, because Revit only lists the latest revision.

While the methods above can get the job done, they take a lot of time and they increase the chance of errors.

Watch our short video to see how you can use Ideate BIMLink to aggregate revision information in Microsoft Excel to edit the options in bulk and Ideate Sticky to bring the formatted Excel schedule back into Revit to place onto sheets.

 

You’ll see how the work that has taken you hours if not days can be reduced to just minutes by completing two simple steps.

For implementation services or to learn more about how Ideate BIMLink and Ideate Sticky can help your business, please contact sales@ideatesoftware.com

About the Author

Sash Kazeminejad - AIA, LEED AP, BCI, BCC - Customer Success Manager
Sash earned his Master of Architecture from Montana State University and is a California registered architect, LEED Accredited Professional, and a Bluebeam Certified Instructor. 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.