Revit Schedules: A Love Hate relationship

Posted on behalf of David Conant - Principal User Experience Designer:

A product like Revit that is moving from adolescence to early maturity needs to revisit its roots periodically to make sure that it is not coasting on early glory. To illustrate, let me turn on the time machine.

The scene: An architect’s office late 1999.

The action: I am demonstrating a Beta build of Revit 1.0. On screen we see a floor plan, an elevation, and a window schedule. In the floor plan, I add a window. It appears immediately in the elevation and a new line appears on the schedule listing an instance of Window Type 2. I delete another window from the elevation and it disappears from the schedule and plan.

The reaction: “That’s amazing, I love it. Checking window schedules is so tedious. Now how do I put the window type symbol in the schedule? No? I’m going to hate that. What about adding comments or shading every other line? That can’t be hard. I’m sure you’ll fix it soon.”

Now: It’s 2012. Revit schedules can do much more than they did in 1999. You can add new properties, perform some calculations, and group header cells together. Unfortunately they don’t provide full control over cell format, won’t schedule a generic model component, or display a window tag. “You’re killing me” I hear.

Schedules and related elements such as Legends, Takeoffs, Lists, or Reports are powerful and highly useful features of Revit. They do, however, have a number of limitations both in the data that can be presented and how it is presented. Some are the result of constraints imposed by current interface tools, others reflect deeper issues in the Revit data structure and regeneration engines. To build a better picture of how the tools should be working, the AEC User Experience team is studying schedules and related non-graphical data display tools.

As one part of this research effort, I am gathering information on how you use or want to use schedule and schedule like methods in your work. If you are interested in helping us in this, I have provided a link to a short survey focused on your usage and a request for you to share image samples of what you are doing.  Samples of real work are an important part of our research. They will be used as test cases and help us illustrate themes as we explore methods to increase flexibility and capability. They need not be confined to what you can currently produce in Revit. Examples of what does not work well or appear correctly in Revit are more useful than what worked well.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/66BVMW3

_David Conant

 

 

Comments

[Tom]

I'll paste my answer from the survey, as I'm sure they will be the top concerns for many people:

1. Multiple page support. When the project contains hundreds of items, splitting that schedule up manually so that it fits on multiple pages is the most painful task imaginable. So painful that we just don't bother. We export and reformat in Excel.

2. WYSIWYG editing. Why are there separate representations for editing schedules and placing them on sheets? All other sheet-place-able items behave exactly the same when you double click them or when you activate them on a sheet. Making one schedule look the same as another is a tedious and best-guess process.

3. "Reverse interrogation" - I don't know if that's the correct term. Room Data Sheets are impossible to make in Revit. The data is plainly there - every Lighting, Furniture, Plumbing Fixture knows which Room it is in. This information can be included on Furniture, Lighting etc. schedules. But you cannot make the query in the other direction. "Please show me all the objects from categories A, B and C that are in room 001" - "Repeat for all rooms, on automatically numbered pages" - This would be a true godsend and timesaver.

[Troels]

Tom, for the love of the sweet lord jesus, learn Access or hire help to set up a workflow. Scheduling 500 rooms / 1000 doors? No problem. In Excel scheduling (as in revit) anything that needs to split - alas always a major pain.

[Steve Bennett]

Toms comment echos almost exactly what I said. We shouldn't have to "learn Access" or hire a programmer to make a software that runs $5k (approx.) a seat do, what it should do in the first place...

[Troy Gates]

I took the survey but wanted to add my top 3 here.

1. Ability to add symbology to schedules (similar to legend components).

2. Ability to have greater control over text and lines. Making schedules into a family object would be great so that all parts of the schedule could be modified.

3. Greater formula functionality between parameters, other families' parameter values, other category families' parameter values, and totals.

[P. Lawton]

For Revit MEP, the answer is:

PERMIT LINKING & IMPORTING EXCEL INTO REVIT!

This cannot be programmatically difficult, Autodesk just refuses to do it. Why? Probably so they can offer it in Revit MEP 2018, and call it a Major Improvement (please send us your subscription fee, right now).

As engineers, we will ALWAYS prefer Excel for schedules, since the person doing the calculation and product selection has full control over all information displayed (without having to learn to program in Revit). This is a big deal because every mechanical component in a project has vastly different parameters, and making families that have all those parameters is too expensive for us to do - then trying to build a schedule that counts all those pararmeters, (when only two of this particular component will be on the project) is far too much work for the budget.

Furthermore, using Excel suits our workflow, because the engineer can parallel process that aspect of the documents, while the designer is working on pipe and duct routing.

I'm quite sure I'm not the first person to request the ability to link to Excel - so how about it, Autodesk? Why won't you allow linking in spreadsheets?

[BimGuru]

my top 3:
1. Sorting schedules in project browser by schedule type/ disciplines etc...
2. Apply view templates for schedules for apparences, sorting etc...
3. Apply the same above to legends.