From the course: Learning Revit 2022

Adding a schedule view - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Learning Revit 2022

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Adding a schedule view

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to talk about schedules and specifically when we create our own custom schedule. So just to remind you what a schedule is, a schedule is actually a live view of the model, it's just in tabular format instead of graphical format. So rather than a floor plan, like you see here, it's going to be more like a spreadsheet kind of presentation. So there are a few schedules here in the project already. So here under schedules and quantities, you could see that have a door schedule, a room schedule and a window schedule. Each of those came in when we created the project initially as part of the template we chose. So I'm going to double click the door schedule just to show you an example. As you can see here, each individual door is listed, now we've seen the numbers before, when we tagged the doors, so each door had a unique number. And we also saw that if you went to edit type that there was a designation applied as a type mark to the door. So that's what these first two columns are looking at. The width or the heights of the doors we've seen that graphically directly in the model in floor plans or elevations. Now the rest of this information over here is just text information that I typed in. So you can easily change it directly here in the schedule, or you can do it back in the model by selecting an object on screen and changing it on the properties palette. So if you want to make any modifications to any of that information, you are welcome to do so. Now there's a room schedule and a window schedule, and these are similar. So once again, here's the numbers, the names, I filled in all of this finished information here and you're welcome to explore that further. So I'm going to close both of those schedules. And what I want to do now, is create my own custom schedule, and I'm going to focus on the furniture category for this. So let's say we were going to go have a client meeting and we wanted to discuss the furniture layout. It might be nice to have in hand a list of all the furniture as it currently stands, and use that as part of the discussion. So we're going to go to the view tab, click on these schedules drop down here, and then choose this item schedules and quantities. And this will create a new schedule. Now, if you've got a filter list here, you want to just make sure that at least the architecture discipline is chosen and that will ensure that you can see the furniture category. So if you don't see the furniture category, it might just be this filter list that you have to modify. Yours might vary especially if you're in Revit LT. All right, so we're going to click furniture as the category, I'm going to accept the default name that it gives me right there and click OK. So next that displays schedule properties where on the left, we have a list of all of the available properties for the furniture category. And the way to think about this, is these are all the questions that we can ask of our furniture. So just like with tags, I told you to think of the tag is asking its host to object a question. That's exactly what a schedule is doing, except it typically asks multiple questions and it asks it of all of the objects than just a single one. So what information are we interested in seeing about our furniture? I'm going to start with the level. So this is a two-story project, and the first thing I want to know is, what level is this furniture on? So I'm going to select level, click this green arrow button right here to add that to my schedule. Alternatively, you can double click a field name and that will add it. So I'm going to double click family and type, and that's just the family name and the type name placed together in the same field. And then I'm going to do two more, the count and the comments. So I'm going to keep this a really simple schedule. Let's click OK. So that will open that new furniture schedule view, and then you'll see here that there's a really long scroll bar because we have quite a few pieces of furniture already here in this project. Now, right off the bat there's a few things we want to do to make this a little bit easier to work with. The first thing is, I can't read the full name of the family and type. So you can click right between columns B and C and drag and enlarge the width of that column. Next, the text is a little small, so I'm going to hold down my Control key and roll my wheel up a few clicks to zoom in on that information so I can read it a little bit more easily. Now, when you scroll through it, I want to point out to you that the header and the title is scrolling off the page. And that's not very convenient, so right here on the modified tab, we have this freeze header button and that's going to make that behave a little bit nicer because now the headers and titles will stay on screen as we scroll. So when you start to scroll through here, you probably seeing some patterns, right? We're getting a table followed by some chairs and then it repeats, but everything is kind of somewhat random. So it's a little difficult to kind of get our arms around all of this data and really understand what we're looking at. So the next thing we want to do, is look at ways of sorting and grouping the information to make it more legible and more presentable. So the way we do that, is to come over here to the properties palette, it should say schedule here at the top. And then if you scroll down, you're going to see five edit buttons over here. Each of those corresponds to one of the tabs in the schedule properties window. So we want to click the edit button next to sorting and grouping, and we have lots of options that we can explore here. So when you open up this drop-down list for sort, it includes the fields that you've added to this schedule. So why don't we take a look at family and type and see if that helps us in any way. So I'm going to choose that, click OK, and see what happens. Now, you saw a slight change there, the tables disappeared and I'm seeing all the Breuer chairs next to one another, and that might be an improvement, but notice that it goes from Breuer chairs on level one to Breuer chairs in level two, and then when we get to the end of all of those, it starts over again in level one with the dining tables, and it keeps going back and forth between level one and level two. So when I think about that, I'm thinking, well, it might be nicer to actually start with the level and then organize by the family and type. So we can easily go back to sorting and grouping, change the first sort by to level, and then go to family and type next. And when I click OK, now you're going to see it change if we go back to the top of the list here, all of the level one furniture comes first and then about halfway down here we're going to see it switch to level two. Now, we can improve that and make it even nicer. Instead of seeing level one and level two over and over again, what we can do, is go here to sorting and grouping. And I can turn this first sort criteria level into a header. In addition to that, I can introduce a blank line between the values. When I click OK, you're going to see that occur right here between level one and level two. Notice that I have a header right here for level two, and then directly above it, there's some space, that's the blank line. And if we go back to the top of the schedule, you can see a header up here for level one. So that clearly makes column a redundant, so I can click right on column A, highlight the whole thing and use this hide button here on the ribbon to hide that column. Now we're not removing that column, we're just simply hiding it in the schedule, because it's still showing here as a sort criteria and a header. So now I'm going to click on the first item just to sort of deselect that column. Now what can I do? Well, the next thing that I notice is, that the item I have selected is a 54 inch booth, but right below that I have a 72 inch booth but there's actually several of those. So when I look right here, these are all the same item and they're all listing a quantity of one. And that seems pretty redundant as well. So is there some way that we can collapse that information down and make it more user friendly? And in fact we can, if we just go back to sorting and grouping and we're going to uncheck, itemize every instance. Now while I'm here, I'll also introduce a grand total at the bottom of the schedule, let's click OK, and that dramatically changes the presentation of the entire schedule. So now I don't even really have a scroll bar anymore, I'm seeing each item listed individually with a quantity in the count column and this line item right here for example represents 74 separate chairs. So it's a much nicer presentation of this information and certainly a lot easier for us to digest the information quickly. Now there's a few final finishing touches that I want to make here. I'm going to take column B, and then use this align horizontal and align it to the right, which is a little nicer for numerical data. I'm going to go back into the column B header and realign that to the center. Then I'm going to come back over here to sorting and grouping, and I'm going to add a footer at the bottom of the level, and this is going to allow us to get a subtotal here and here next to each level, and then there's our grand total there at the bottom. So feel free to explore further in the schedule properties window, and with the tools on the ribbon. We've only scratched the surface of what's possible here, but with just those few small changes that we've made, we've created a list of all 200 furniture items that's now very easy for us to discuss with our recipient and talk about the current state of our furniture layout.

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