Every day, our Ideate Software Support team fields all types of questions from AECO professionals all around the world. You can review some of these recent question and answers via our Ideate Software support series blog category.

Here is a good question that came across our virtual desk.

“I was wondering if there is a way to number doors according to the ‘To Room’ number information, and following a sequence off 1, 2, 3, etc.; without the need to pick the doors or marking a path.”

There are several ways to accomplish this task very easily within Ideate ReNumber which is a tool within the IdeateApps collection.

The easiest step-by-step answer for the question asked by our customer is included in our “Getting Started” online Help topic for IdeateApps called Renumber Doors.

Within a default Revit Schedule View, you can modify the ‘From Room’ and ‘To Room’ values if those properties appear within your schedule.

Ideate ReNumber can easily modify those ‘From Room’ and ‘To Room’ properties on the fly within the renumbering process. You can also choose to report on the ‘From Room’ value instead of making the change within the Revit database.

Ideate ReNumber can be used to change the Revit values for the ‘To Room’ and ‘From Room’ properties whether you are using the Room Calculation Point property or not. (Door swing graphics will only change if you are using the Room Calculation Point property.) Once the doors are properly set to the correct room, future numbering tasks are a snap.

 
The Flip Room button will change the relationship within the Revit database and update the Door Mark value.   

If you just want to report on the ‘From Room’ value, this will push the value into the door Mark but NOT change the Revit database.

 
Ideate ReNumber will identify doors that are using the ‘Room Calculation Point’ property. When this property is active, the door swing graphics will update when changing the ‘To Room’ and ‘From Room’ flip button. If this property is not in use, the door swing graphics will not update.

You can use our delivered door rule to renumber doors based upon the room values.

Please review this very detailed 8-minute video on the features of door renumbering with Ideate ReNumber.

Additionally, you can renumber door instance marks via a Revit Schedule View by activating the Ideate ReNumber tool within an active Revit Schedule View.

When Ideate ReNumber is started from an active Revit Schedule View, the only available selection method will be Auto-Number by View.

This online help article is a detailed explanation for managing door numbering with Ideate ReNumber. 

Keep those amazing questions coming to [email protected] and we will keep answering them!

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 23 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, February 07, 2023 – Ideate Software, an Autodesk® AEC Industry Partner and Autodesk® Authorized Developer, presents its latest customer spotlight. This story is about Parkin Architects, a well-known architectural leader in Canada for acute and mental healthcare, recreation, science, technology and research, justice, corrections, and education. 

Parkin initially started using Ideate BIMLink to meet a specific need and has since expanded its use of Ideate Software tools to include Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, and IdeateApps.

“Delivering as promised is critical, and Ideate Software helps us do that,” said Oscar Ramos-Martinez, BIM Manager, Parkin. “Their products address challenges we face, and they are easy to learn and use.”

Here are some examples of how Parkin uses Ideate Software add-ins for Revit:

• Ideate BIMLink: Set up new models with functional project data, transfer parameter values to doors from hosts, manage FF&E ID information, and manage room data
• Ideate Explorer: Quality control activities. “With Ideate Explorer and its Query tool, we can find any element in the model, select it, locate it within the model, browse through its properties, identify issues, and more,” said Oscar. 
• Ideate Sticky: Live-link Microsoft Excel spreadsheets containing code requirements to Revit files
• IdeateApps: Apply room numbers to doors, create views, align views. “As we are preparing documents for submission, we simply run Ideate Align and the alignments are perfect,” said Oscar.   

Read Spotlight on Parkin Architects for more.

Visit www.ideatesoftware.com to learn how Ideate Software add-ins for Revit help users save time, increase model accuracy, improve deliverables, and elevate design. Give them a try by  downloading trial versions or purchasing the bundle for access to Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, IdeateApps, and Ideate StyleManager for six 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. They developed Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, IdeateApps, and Ideate StyleManager to solve persistent problems in architecture, engineering, and construction, and owner-operator (AECO) workflows. They developed Ideate Automation to boost the power of their Revit plugins by running time-intensive activities in the background.

Autodesk and Autodesk Revit are 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.

Those of you responsible for maintaining or verifying data and documentation quality in your Revit models will find the recording of this webinar valuable. You’ll learn about our six Revit add-in solutions that can streamline your QA processes of implementing Revit model standards and your QC processes of fixing problems that occur within a Revit model either as they happen or as part of a review process. You’ll also see demonstrations of common workflows for each of the Ideate Software solutions:

• Manage view names with Ideate BIMLink
• Audit the Revit model and manage elements on specific worksets with Ideate Explorer
• Manage styles with Ideate StyleManager
• Schedule repeatable processes with Ideate Automation
• Increase data accuracy with the 10 tools in the IdeateApps collection
• Live-link external documents with Ideate Sticky

This webinar was held on 01-31-23 for the Americas region. A similar one was held on 02-15-23 for the EMEA region, and one was held on 04-27-23 for the APAC region.  

Browse our website to learn more about how Ideate Software add-ins 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

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.

Do you wish you had more time to impress your manager, coworkers, and customers with your design ideas? Here is an easy way to add hours back into your day. Get IdeateApps! This collection of 10 productivity-enhancing tools simplifies common, repetitive Revit tasks. These productivity-enhancing tools improve the look as well as the performance of your Revit models, and they give you more time to work on bringing your innovative and creative designs to life.

Learn more about these 10 powerful tools by reading this blog category on IdeateApps. It is in addition to the post of March 30, 2022, which was about the top Revit plugins developed by Ideate Software. In that post, we highlighted all our tools: Ideate Explorer, Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Sticky, Ideate StyleManager, and IdeateApps. 

About IdeateApps

IdeateApps is a set of add-in tools for Revit. These BIM tools give users easy access to data in their models, making it much easier and faster to verify and manipulate that data.

Daily Revit users and BIM managers at architecture, engineering, construction, and owner-operator companies around the world consider the IdeateApps tools essential for creating a competitive advantage by decreasing the time spent on common tasks, increasing the accuracy of the data in their Revit models, and enabling them to deliver models that truly reflect their design ideas.

An Introduction to IdeateApps

Take just a few minutes to get a good understanding of all the tools by watching these two videos. The first one highlights nine tools, and the second one highlights the newest one, Ideate Annotate.

 A Look at Each Tool

Below are links to some of the many how-to videos on IdeateApps available on our website. Access many more as well as recorded webinars from the IdeateApps Playlist on our Video Library. 

• Sheet and View Management Tools: Ideate Sheet Manager, Ideate Align, Ideate Clone, and Ideate ViewCreator
  
  You can see an overview of all the Sheet and View tools within the collection by watching this recorded webinar from The Architect’s Newspaper.
   
  • Ideate SheetManager
    The Revit project browser does not provide adequate support for sheet creation and layout. Watch this short video to see how to use Ideate SheetManager to filter sheet and view information, create new sheets, and place views onto sheets:
    
    
     
  • Ideate Align
    See how easy it is to align multiple views across sheets by: 1) using the model coordinates of similar views, or 2) keeping the view position relative to the title blocks
    
    
     
  • Ideate Clone
    See a short demonstration on how to use Ideate Clone to copy a sheet with viewports to a sheet that will match all the title block and sheet properties of the original sheet. You’ll also see how to place and control unplaced views on the newly created sheet so they align with the previous viewports:
    
    
     
  • Ideate ViewCreator
    Creating a drawing or sets of drawings in Revit can be a laborious and time-consuming process. Watch this video to see how to use the Rooms View creation method in Ideate ViewCreator to automate the naming of interior elevations and other room-based view types. You will also see how to quickly assemble new sheets to match your desired layouts.
    
    
     
• Ideate SpellCheck
  The Revit spellchecker doesn’t check data in schedules. Ideate SpellCheck does. Here’s a link to a six-minute video with the highlights:
  
  
   
• Ideate ReNumber
  • See how to dramatically reduce the amount of time spent on tedious renumbering tasks. Watch this short video to learn how to use Ideate ReNumber to:
    • Sequentially renumber Revit elements by various methods
    • Easily push data from one Revit parameter to another
    • Quickly set up and customize the numbering rules to create sophisticated solutions for hundreds of tedious renumbering tasks

• Ideate XRay
  Watch this short video to see how easy it is to search for elements that are hidden within a specific view with Ideate XRay and the Ideate XRay selection wizard:
  
  
   
• Ideate SmartDelete
  • Have you ever delete an element in a Revit model only to have other elements disappear along with it? That’s not a problem with Ideate SmartDelete. Take a look at this five-minute video to learn why that happens and how to avoid it by:
    • Reviewing the deletion set
    • Previewing other elements, dimensions, regions, keynote tags, etc. that will be delete with your deletion set
    • Remove the elements you don’t want deleted
    • Refresh the list of elements that will be deleted to ensure it is correct

• Ideate QuickSelect
  Unlike the Revit project browser, Ideate QuickSelect is a model browser that can be used to view all instances of hard-to-find times such as model or annotation elements, inserted or linked CAD files, section boxes, scope boxes, elevation markers, section markers, schedule graphics, and view references. Here’s a seven-minute demonstration video:
  
  
   
• Ideate Annotate
  Watch this short video to learn how to reduce liability by ensuring the legibility of tags, text, dimensions, and other annotative elements. You’ll also learn how you can support Revit design documentation and/or quality control activities through enhanced browse and review workflows that expedite production documentation work through easy access to all annotative elements:
  
  

Learn More

Visit www.ideatesoftware.com to learn how Ideate Software Revit plugins for architecture, engineering, construction, and owner-operators help users save time, increase model accuracy, improve deliverables, and elevate design. Give them a try by downloading trial versions or purchasing the “get to know us” bundle for access to Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, IdeateApps, and Ideate StyleManager for six months.

Stay Connected

Check us out on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

If you have any questions, reach out to us. We are here to help you understand and use our Revit plugin solutions. 

People often think of Revit for architects and engineers who use it to test design ideas, translate conceptual designs into BIM data, optimize building efficiency, create realistic renderings, and prepare documentation with the details needed for construction teams to build the designs. 

The benefits don’t end when the documents are passed from the architects to the contractors. In fact, the benefits of having Revit models of planned buildings or structures continue through the construction phase and even through the owner-operator phase. 

In this blog post, we focus on Revit and the construction industry. We will address how it is used by owner-operators in a future post.

Because the BIM process automates many challenges faced by companies in the construction industry, several governments have mandated the use of BIM for government projects to save time and money through better planning, designing, and management of buildings and infrastructure. In countries where BIM is not mandated, many construction companies are choosing to implement BIM anyway, because they are watching their competitors who follow BIM processes automate activities that help them gain competitive advantages in terms of win rates and successful project completions. 

Revit and the Construction Industry

Because Revit is the most popular BIM tool in the world, it is safe to say that as BIM usage spreads throughout the construction industry, the use of Revit will increase as well. Construction companies that use Revit will realize several advantages, including:

• Clearer Communications with Architects
  Realistic 3D models created in Revit dramatically reduce any delays caused by misunderstandings about the architect’s design. The documentation includes all the parameters and shapes of the structural elements, part details, and systems such as plumbing, electrical, and HVAC, which the contractors can reference throughout the construction project.
   
• Better Stakeholder Communications
  With the integration of cloud technology, project data can be accessed from anywhere, allowing project managers to keep their teams and other stakeholders current on project status.
   
• Revision Management
  Change happens, even when the architectural drawings have bene finalized. The client may have a new idea, supply chain issues may impact product availability, or manufacturers may make changes that need to be addressed in the design. Contractors that use Revit can make changes in the existing model, recalculate parameters, and confirm that the new designs don’t negatively impact other elements. 
   
• Accurate Materials Lists
  Ordering too much material, not ordering enough, or ordering the wrong material are common problems with construction teams that cause cost overruns, delays, and frustrated teams and clients. Construction companies that use Revit can minimize waste and reduce costs by using Revit to automatically calculate the required amount of resources and the budget.
   
• Stability Testing
  Revit software can be used by contractors to detect structural flaws by assessing the stability of foundations, systems, fixtures, materials, and more. This pre-construction step helps confirm that an architect’s design can be successfully and safely built, potentially saving a tremendous amount of time and money. 
   
• Clash Detection
  As designs change, the risk of clashes increases. Hard clashes, when two components occupy the same space, and soft clashes, when an object encroaches into the tolerance space of another object, can create a huge amount of rework if not found until after construction has started. Revit users can easily detect clashes in designs and generate clash reports that engineers can use to fix the problems, saving time, money, and the contractor’s reputation. 

Ideate Software Add-ins for Revit and the Construction Industry

We develop Revit plugins for architecture, engineering, construction, and owner-operator companies around the world:

• Ideate BIMLink – Control Revit data with precision and speed
• Ideate Explorer – Audit Revit models with certainty
• Ideate Sticky – Integrate and format non-BIM data into Revit projects
• IdeateApps – Simplify everyday Revit tasks with efficiency and elegance
• Ideate StyleManager – Analyze, delete or merge non-standard Revit styles
• Ideate Automation – Run time-intensive BIM tasks silently in the background

Here are some videos with demonstrations of how to use our software for specific construction workflows:

1. Leverage Revit coordinate data for VDC to bring new levels of quality control and efficiency
   See three examples of how Revit coordinate data can support both pre-construction and construction tasks to improve your project’s bottom line.
   
   
    
2. Streamline VDC Tasks
   Dive deeper into methods of streamlining VDC tasks by watching the recording of this 30-minute webinar.
   
   
    
3. Review issues with construction sequencing 
   Watch this four-minute video to see how a project scheduler, who doesn’t know how to use Revit, can use Ideate BIMLink to export Revit data into Excel to enter or edit data, and then import the updated data back to Revit, which can create 4D models that construction teams can review for issues and opportunities. The video includes final steps for Navisworks users.
   
   
    
4. Get comprehensive quantity data with a 2-step quantity takeoff 
   Watch this three-minute video to learn how to harness the power of pivot tables and Microsoft Excel when performing quantity takeoff tasks in Revit. Also learn how to expedite the creation of a formatted quantity takeoff. The example in the video show how to use the Ideate BIMLink sample file template, created in Excel, to get comprehensive quantity data in two easy steps.
   
   
   
   For a FULL list of Ideate BIMLink videos for Construction and Facilities, please see the following link:  Ideate BIMLink for Construction and Facilities
    
5. Keep all team members up to date on critical ancillary information
   See how live-linking important Excel, Word, or PDF documents, such as work orders, safety reports, and insurance certificates can ensure your team has quick access to current information, so they can respond to requests quickly and correctly.
   
   
   
    
6. Publish project PDF information on a consistent and repeatable basis
   Ideate Automation is a scripting solution that is designed for use with Ideate software solutions such as Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Apps, and  Ideate StyleManager. It can also be used without Ideate Software solutions to report on Family information or publish information from a series of Revit models.
   
   

Learn More

Visit www.ideatesoftware.com to learn how Ideate Software Revit plugins for architecture, engineering, construction, and owner-operators help users save time, increase model accuracy, improve deliverables, and elevate design. Give them a dry by downloading trial versions or purchasing the “get to know us” bundle for access to Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, IdeateApps, and Ideate StyleManager for six months.

Stay Connected

Check us out on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

If you have any questions, reach out to us. We are here to help you understand and use our Revit plugin solutions.