Customizing a schedule view - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] Sometimes you have a schedule and it's not reporting exactly the information you need so you need to customize it in some way. In this example let's say that we went to our building owner and we showed them this furniture schedule and they said that it was useful. But what they really wanted to know is how many persons their restaurants could seat. So we go back and consider a way to achieve that. And what we could do is modify this furniture schedule directly. But best practice says that it's a little bit nicer to actually create a copy of it first. Just in case. This way you're preserving the original schedule without modification to it. So I will right-click the Furniture Schedule on Project Browser. Come up here to Duplicate View, and choose Duplicate. That'll create Furniture Schedule Copy 1. I'll right-click that and rename it. I will remove Copy 1 from the end of the name. And then change Furniture to Seating Schedule. All right now I want to get a better look at this. So I'm going to hold down my Control key and roll the wheel up a few clicks to zoom in a little bit closer. To make everything a little bit easier to read. All right so now our next goal is to remove anything from this schedule that is not seating. So we want to focus only on the seating elements in our collection of furniture. Furthermore we want to also make sure that we're getting an accurate count of how many persons each seating element can accommodate. So let's start with removing anything that is not seating. So with the schedule open here, if you look over at the Properties palette. It should be telling you the properties of the schedule. And if you scroll down you'll see five Edit buttons here next to several parameters. So what we want to do is go to the Edit button next to filter. This will display the filter dialog where you will have a dropdown listing the things that this schedule can be filtered by. Now what a filter does is it removes elements from the schedule that don't meet a criteria that you designate. Now at the moment it's only allowing us to do that for Level and Comments. Neither of which is going to give us what we need. So what we're going to do is go back to the Fields tab then and add another field to this schedule. Now notice that this schedule does have Family and Type, and Count. But neither of those are eligible for filtering. So we couldn't use those. So we need to find another field that will do the trick. So what I've done in this exercise file before we started was I began inputting type marks for the furniture within this file. So the Type Mark field will be a really easy way for us to exactly what we need. So I'm going to select that field, add it to the schedule. So that'll come in where my cursor was which was right near count. And then I'll just move it up a few clicks to just below Level. Now let's go back to the Filter tab. And if you open up the list, notice that Type Mark is now available on that list. So we'll choose that. Then that gives us various operators that we can choose from. Now you can see that there are several choices here. And what I've done with the type marks is I use the letter S for seating and then some unique designation. So the easiest way for us to isolate all of the seating elements would be to choose the begins with option here. And then simply type in the letter S. Now this is case sensitive. So I used uppercase S. So you're going to want to put in uppercase S here. So what we're saying is, only include the items on this schedule whose type mark begins with the letter capital S. And I'll click OK. And at the moment, that is one element. And I've labeled that SB1, seating booth one. Now, clearly we're filtering too many elements because I've only filled in the one. So we need to fill in type mark designations now for the rest of the seating elements. So how do we do that? Well the easiest way to do that is to get back to one of our graphical views. So I'll go to my Enlarged Dining Room Plan. Double-click to open that. And I'll zoom in just a little bit here. And notice that the seating booth one is still selected here. So that item that I've already labeled. Because I selected in in schedule, it's still selected here in the model. Now right next to that seating booth one is a slightly larger booth. And one way that we could input the type mark designation would be to select that next booth over. Click Edit Type here on Properties palette, scroll down and locate the Type Mark property. And input the value we want. SB2, seating booth two. And then I'll click OK. And I could keep going like that for the remainder of the items but if I don't have any visual cue on screen to let me know which ones are already labeled and which ones aren't. It can be a little bit difficult to do this task. So what I recommend that you do instead is tag all of the furniture first. This'll make it very clear which ones have been given type mark designations and which ones we still need to do. So the fastest way to do that will be to go to the Annotate tab and use the Tag All Not Tagged command. So I'll choose that. And it'll default to only selected elements in the current view. And that's because when we open this dialog I had this booth right here selected. Now if I click OK it would only tag that one booth so I don't want that. Change it to all elements in the current view. Then check Furniture Tags. But before you click OK, notice that there are three different Furniture Tags loaded in this project. So the one that I want is the third one. The last one on the list there. Because the first two are instance tags. And that means that we would have to type in an individual value for each and every seating element. And that would sort of defeat the whole purpose. What we want is a type-based designation. So you want to choose Furniture Tag : Boxed, Click OK. And that will add these rectangular tags to all of the elements in this view. Now notice that all the booths already have a designation. Because they're all the same type as the one that I modified a moment ago. So now what I need to do is select any one of the tags for any of the remaining elements. Now it looks like a daunting task at first 'cause you're like, "Wow, look at all this furniture." Well, hover right over the little question mark there. That'll say Edit Parameter. Click again. How about SC1 for seating chair one. Press Enter. And it will ask us if we can apply this to all instances of this type. In other words, Revit recognizes that that's the type mark parameter which is a type-based property. So when we say Yes here, notice that they all fill in. So what looked like a daunting task was actually quite simple. Because these are all the same kind of chair. And it turns out that that's it, we're already all done. That's all the elements that we needed to do for this model. So let's go back to our seating schedule. And now you can see that we have several line items in this schedule. Now you can also see that it's still grouped by levels. So we have some of these items on both the first and the second floor. Now you might be tempted to go to your client now and tell them that they can seat 162 patrons. But we're not quite done yet. Because remember that a booth can often seat more than one person. So what we really need to do is run a calculation now that determines how many persons each seating element can accommodate. And then that will feed into our grand total. So our last step is to go over to the properties of the schedule. Scroll down. And let's go to fields. So we'll click that Edit button. And right here in the middle, we're going to add a new parameter. So we're going to create our own custom parameter here. And I will call this Number of Persons. And it's very important that you change the type of parameter. We don't want it to be length, it should be an integer. So an integer is just a whole number. And then another very important thing is to make sure that we make it a type-based parameter. Because everything that we're doing here is at the type level. We don't want to have to input the number of persons for each and every seating element. Again, that would be way too much work. So we just want to do it at the type level. Integer here, we'll click OK. That'll come in at the bottom. I'll move that to just after Count and then click OK. So we'll now see a new column D appear for Number of Persons. And you can edit that value right here in the schedule. So for seating booth one, that's our short booth. That can accommodate two persons. When I press Enter, it will ask me if I can apply that to all instances of type. I'll click OK. Seating booth two is a little longer. We can accommodate three persons there. I'll click OK. And then finally the individual chairs can accommodate one person each. And I'll click OK. And notice that those items were reused on the second floor, so we're done. Because those values are already filled in using the same types. So now all that remains for us to do is to run the calculation to multiply the Count column here by the Number of Persons here. And it turns out that's really easy to do. So come over there to there to the Properties palette. Click the Edit button next to Formatting, and let's do two things. I want to format column D just like the Count column. So what we'll do is select Number of Persons here, and change it's alignment from left to right. And then, to perform the calculation, all you have to do is from this drop-down right here, choose calculate totals. Let's click OK, and see our final result. So now you can see that Number of Persons instead of showing us the number of persons per item, is now doing the calculation times the count and giving us the total number of persons for that entire line item. So we're getting those values. We get a subtotal for each floor. And then at the very bottom we're getting 193 persons. And that's the value that we can go back and present to our owner for the total seating capacity of their restaurant.