Friday, March 6, 2009

Text Notes

So in Jumpy Text, we looked at a technique that we can employ to alleviate the well known deficiencies of text in Revit. Now you know how to use Key Schedules for this purpose, but I wanted to take this a little step further after a great tip I learned from a discussion with my good friend Daniel Hurtubise of RevitIt.

I mentioned the problem of the schedule title being the same as the name of the key schedule in the Project Browser (PB). So if you prefix the names to group them nicely in the PB, you’ll have a problem with your title. To get around this, we can disable the title and group the headings. Then we can type in our new “title” in this new space, independently of the name!

The problem though is that for notes on documents, we don’t need the headings, so this solution wouldn’t be very clean as we don’t want to see the parameter names and if we turn them off, so does the new group “title”. However Revit lets us edit these names and to my surprise (and here comes my little contribution), it lets us make them blank! So by unchecking the option Blank row before data, we can still end up with a separate title, a blank row and our text notes indented with a number for each paragraph, as you can see below (click to see larger animation). This is without a doubt a better solution than typing text for the title. Enjoy!

KeySchedTrick


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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Using 2010 huh? Nice.

Erik said...

Another elegant "hack." I like it.

Anonymous said...

Why not just leave Show title checked and uncheck Show headers in the appearance tab?

Dave Baldacchino said...

What if for example you want to have a couple of Key Schedules named "General Notes"? You cannot have duplicate names in the Project Browser. Also, what if you're using a lot of Key Schedules for their intended purpose and want to segregate all the ones used as "note blocks" all together? That's where this comes in handy...you prefix the names of all these "note blocks" with "txt_" for example and then you can enter a title independently of their name.

Anonymous said...

How did you create your gif video for this tip?

Kevin

Dave Baldacchino said...

Produced as GIF with Camtasia.

Buz said...

New to Revit Struture, wondering how you get your text in your schedule?

Dave Baldacchino said...

It's all explained in the post "Jumpy Text".

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