We were honored that in 2020, ZGF Architects, BD Mackey Consulting and BIM Guru participated in our webinar series on how customers use Ideate Software solutions. In case you missed the webinars or you’d like to watch them again or share them with your colleagues, below are the links. The recordings are also in our Customer Webinars Playlist on our YouTube Channel. 

If you are interested in showcasing your company, BIM management best practices and use of Ideate Software solutions, please contact us. We’d love to hear from you and share your expertise with our customers.

ZGF Architects and Ideate Software Unveil Winning Revit Strategies

Simplify Revit Tasks with Brian Mackey and Ideate Software

Revit Model Management with Gavin Crump and Ideate Software

We’d also encourage you to access customer-focused webinars from previous years, filled with Revit data management tips and tricks shared by BIM professionals from the following firms:

• CBT Architects
  • The “I” in BIM - How to Transfer Data to and from Revit
     
• Payette
  • BIM Managers Set the Stage for Increased Knowledge and Productivity
     
• BD Mackey Consulting
  • Hitting a High Note: Tuning your Revit Template
     
• Steinberg Hart
  • Developing Efficient Processes
     
• SNC Lavalin
  • How to become a BIM Manager Superstar

We will continue this series in 2021, so please keep an eye on our Events page for details. If you’d like to be added to our email distribution list, send a note to [email protected].

We send a sincere thank you to Paul Aubin, from Paul F. Aubin Consulting Services, for reviewing our Revit productivity solutions. With 30+ years of experience, Paul is an independent architectural consultant providing Revit software training and implementation services. He has authored many books, including Renaissance Revit, and has posted dozens of Revit courses and tips and tricks videos to LinkedIn Learning.   

Last month we posted the first part of Paul’s article where he talked about Ideate QuickSelect and Ideate Explorer. Here is the second part of Paul’s article where he talks about Ideate StyleManager.

Ideate Software Tools Have Enhanced my Revit Workflows

I have recently added Ideate Software solutions to my Revit installation and workflow. I find myself going to the Ideate Software tab on an increasingly regular basis. In these articles, I will share just a few of my favorite “go-to” tools. But first, if you are not familiar with them, Ideate Software makes Revit productivity solutions that are available individually or in bundles. They work directly inside of Revit and are accessed from their own Ideate Software tab on the ribbon. 

While I focus this article on Ideate StyleManager, the complete collection of tools offered by Ideate Software is worth your taking the time to fully explore. 

Ideate StyleManager

Ideate StyleManager offers unique functionality that becomes more valuable as your projects grow in complexity and size. Across the top of the dialog are a series of buttons that allow you to analyze several important standards items like Object Styles, Line Patterns and View Templates to name a few. Have you ever worked in a project where there seems to be endless line style or fill pattern definitions and many that are identical but with varying names? How do you even begin to clean this up? The answer is Ideate StyleManager! 

Each tab is similar. In the following example, I’ll consider Line Patterns. You start with a list on the left of all items in the project. Some of these will be highlighted in color. A question mark will initially appear next to each item. You can select any item in the list and get information about it on the right. But before you do, it is best to run an analysis. Select a group of items using the SHIFT and/or CTRL keys. I usually do the whole list, but it can sometimes take a while to process, so alternatively you can select just some items. But either way, give it a few moments while it processes. To do so, click the Analyze! button at the bottom. 

Figure 1 - Colors are used in the list to indicate duplicate items

After the analysis is complete, numbers will appear in the first column. These indicate how many times the element is being used. Items that list zero are not being used and can optionally be purged. Above the list is a collection of checkboxes that can be used to filter the list. These include: Used, Not Used, Duplicates, etc. 

The first time I used this tool, the colors confused me a bit. I was looking for a legend that defined what the colors mean. There is no legend. All colors mean the same thing. These are duplicates. Unique colors are assigned to each corresponding group of duplicate items. So, any orange item is the same as any other orange item. The same is true for any yellow item. It will match any other yellow item and so on. 

Another nice feature is the preview that appears when you select an item in the list. In the next figure, you can see a preview of the selected line pattern on the right side near the top. You also get a list of elements using this style.

Figure 2 - After you press Analyze, quantities appear on the left and information about the selected item shows on the right

Now here’s the best part of Ideate StyleManager. When you discover that you have duplicates, you can merge them! To do so, use your SHIFT or CTRL keys to select the duplicate items. (Make sure you analyze first). Then at the bottom, click the Merge button. A dialog appears with the names of the items you selected. You must choose one that you want to use. The other(s) will be replaced by the one you select. When complete, a dialog will display the results. 

Figure 3 - Merge selected items into a single style of your choosing!

If you have ever tried to clean up a project and the only tool you have the is the built-in Purge Unused command, you are going to love Ideate StyleManager. They recently added some new types to it, so the tool just keeps getting more robust with each release. 

That is all I have for you in this article. I hope you found those features exciting and worth a look. Ideate Software offers a free trial of their solutions. Browse this website to learn more and download them You can also subscribe to them online. 

Disclosure: I have been granted a license to the Ideate Software tools in exchange for my honest review of the software. The views in this article are my own.

Since Paul’s review of Ideate StyleManager, we have added even more tools to our collection of Revit styles that can be managed. Be sure to review our website for the latest updates and videos on these new features.

The first-ever online Ideate Software user group meetings took place in December. We were delighted to meet online with our customers from the UK, APAC and Americas regions and get creative about BIM data management together. 

The sessions featured BIM professionals that talked about how they have incorporated our Revit solutions into their workflows. 

• Michael Hartley, Technical BIM Manager at Ramboll UK, leads the roll-out and implementation of Ideate Software solutions within his company. “We’ve noticed a huge difference since using Ideate [Software] tools over the past year. We’re only going to get more efficient. The more we learn from them, the more we use them.” Michael presented a Navisworks clash workflow. 
   
• Robert Bell, BIM Manager at Stantec, manages numerous BIM projects across multiple offices. One problem he encountered was “How can we generate dependent views for all our required discipline-specific views? We need each view to have the proper box and naming.” Hear Robert talk about the solution he found. 
   
• Steve Deadman is the Head of BIM at Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects. “We’ve been using Revit and Ideate [Software] for a long time. I’ve been using Ideate tools for many years, so I’m a big fan.” Steve presented tips and tricks on three of our solutions – Ideate SmartDelete, Ideate Clone and Ideate SheetManager (part of the IdeateApps collection) and Ideate Explorer. Watch his presentation.
   
• Yong Tan, Senior Associate at DES Architects and Engineers, shared how Ideate BIMLink enables him and his colleagues to coordinate structural analysis data from RAM into Revit Structure. Watch Yong’s presentation.

The User Groups’ discussions also included topics such as:

• New solutions from Ideate Software
• Ideate StyleManager enhancements
• Images vs. Schedules for Ideate Sticky
• Feedback and Q&A

Many thanks to all those who attended our inaugural user groups meetings. 2021 will see an increased number of such events, as we seek to become increasingly connected with our customers all over the world.

To receive future user group notifications, please complete our registration form. We look forward to hearing and learning from you.

We send a sincere thank you to Paul Aubin, from Paul F. Aubin Consulting Services, for reviewing our Revit productivity solutions. With 30+ years of experience, Paul is an independent architectural consultant providing Revit software training and implementation services. He has authored many books, including Renaissance Revit, and has posted dozens of Revit courses and tips and tricks videos to LinkedIn Learning.   

Here is the first part of Paul’s article where he talks about Ideate QuickSelect and Ideate Explorer. We will post the second part about Ideate StyleManager in January.

Ideate Software Tools Have Enhanced my Revit Workflows

I have recently added Ideate Software solutions to my Revit installation and workflow. I find myself going to the Ideate Software tab on an increasingly regular basis. In these articles, I will share just a few of my favorite “go-to” tools. But first, if you are not familiar with them, Ideate Software makes Revit productivity solutions that are available individually or in bundles. They work directly inside of Revit and are accessed from their own Ideate Software tab on the ribbon. 

While I focus on Ideate QuickSelect and Ideate Explorer in this article, the complete suite of Revit solutions offered by Ideate Software is worth your taking the time to fully explore. 

Ideate QuickSelect

Let’s start with Ideate QuickSelect. This is a very simple but highly useful tool. Whenever I deliver beginner level Revit training, element selection is one of the first things we discuss. Editing in Revit (like any graphical software package) begins with a selection of elements onscreen. The software offers many ways to do this directly with your mouse and various modifier keys on the keyboard. Such methods are fine for simple selections. However, when you need to make a more complex selection, it can sometimes be challenging and/or time consuming using the native tools. For example, let’s say you have a large plan and want a selection containing only doors and windows. You can box select (with a window or crossing selection), and then filter out all categories except Doors and Windows in the Filter dialog. This is effective, but it limits you to selecting by category only. For example, if you only want some of the doors, you must be much more strategic about your initial selection (to avoid the ones you don’t want) and then filter from there. The other out-of-the-box method that is quite handy is the right-click option to select all instances. This is effectively “select by type.” Right-click an element and then using this method, select other element of the same type as the one selected. 

But what if you want to select two types, but not a third? And what if getting that initial selection just right to avoid the ones you don’t want is too tricky? Or what if you want to add to or remove from the selection later without manually CTRL and SHIFT clicking? These are the times when Ideate QuickSelect comes in. 

Ideate QuickSelect combines the best of the filter and right-click methods into a single modeless dialog. It lets you make selections from the active view, your entire project or even from an existing selection (like Filter). Best of all, it lists all elements in their familiar hierarchical tree starting at Category and progressing through Family, Type and even Instance. You simply expand your way down the tree and check the boxes at any level to select. 

Figure 1 - Select items by checking the boxes next to categories, families, types or even instances

Additionally, as you expand each branch you will see the quantity of elements at that level (even before they are selected). If you expand the branch all the way, you will see each instance listed. If you double-click on an instance shown, the active view will zoom to that element. 

If you choose the “Entire Project” option from the Display drop-down at the top, and then double-click an element, an appropriate view will be found and opened to display the element (if it is not visible in the current view). Furthermore, changing the Display options at the top will not drop the selection! So, any elements already selected in the list will remain selected. Naturally, this could be a little risky when using the “Entire Project” option, so I recommend caution or sticking with the “active View” display option most of the time. 

Ideate Explorer

Want even more control over your selection? Try Ideate Explorer. Ideate Explorer has all the features of Ideate QuickSelect plus other tools useful for auditing the project. I won’t dig into all its nuances in this article and will instead remain focused on selection. (However, there are excellent videos on the Ideate Software website that cover the complete functionality of Ideate Explorer and all the other Ideate Software tools). Ideate Explorer adds sorting and filtering to the selection. This means that you can choose from several other sorting schemes rather than the default of Category. 

But what I like best is that you can use Filters. Now these are Revit View Filters that we are talking about here. So, if you have configured Filters to use in your Visibility/Graphics Overrides, they can be used in Ideate Explorer to assist in selection! 

For example, in the next figure I have a project with many elements in the Site category. The left side shows that there are 1,510 such elements in the project. However, I have added information to the properties of many of these elements and a corresponding filter that lets me customize their visibility in certain views using that information. Using that same Filter in Ideate Explorer (shown on the right), you can see that it limits the selection to only 473 elements. This makes it very easy to select exactly the elements needed and leverage all those carefully crafted Filters you may have in your projects. By far one of my favorite selection tricks available in the Ideate Software tools. 

Figure 2 - Using Ideate Explorer, you can use your Revit display Filters to assist in selection

That is all I have for you in this article. I hope you found those features exciting and worth a look. Ideate Software offers a free trial of their solutions. Browse this website to learn more and download them. You can also subscribe to them online. 

Keep an eye out for the second half of my article where I will talk about Ideate StyleManager. 

Disclosure: I have been granted a license to the Ideate Software solutions in exchange for my honest review of the software. The views in this article are my own. 

Recently I had the pleasure of welcoming Gavin Crump to share how he uses Ideate Software applications. Gavin is a BIM enthusiast with more than 10 years of experience and is a Revit Architecture Certified Professional. He founded BIM Guru in Sydney, Australia at the start of 2020, and he runs a popular YouTube channel called Aussie BIM Guru, where he posts two videos a week to share hands-on technical tutorial workflows. 

Gavin got to know Ideate Software tools during his second year working with BIM, and he says he was “pretty blown away from the start.”  

Watch a recording of his presentation, Revit Model Management using Ideate Software, to see Gavin demonstrate workflows he uses with his clients or in day-to-day work related to his business content. Here are some comments he made about three of our products he discussed:

• Ideate BIMLink “I find this tool really handy for data processing and Revit element management.”
• Ideate Explorer “This is my favorite Ideate Software tool, because it is such an innovative tool.”
• Ideate StyleManager “I typically use this for maintaining standards, to see if more than one standard for the same thing is used and for taking away a standard that’s not used in the model.” 
   

Everyone at Ideate Software thanks Gavin for his presentation, which received high marks from attendees. Here are some of the comments we received:

• “I can see huge potential in the Excel link workflow.”    
• “I use Ideate BIMLink a lot but learnt more about Explorer.”
• “I didn't know Align would align views on sheets.”

Browse 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.