Customizing a schedule view - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] Sometimes you need to modify an existing schedule because the information that it reports isn't formatted exactly the way that you need. So let's say I had a meeting with my building owner and we were talking about the furniture within the restaurant and they were happy with what we showed here, this was useful information, but what they really wanted to know is how many people can the restaurant seat. Well, that means that some of the items that are reporting on this schedule don't need to be here and others need to be massaged a little bit in order to give us the correct values. So, for example, now none of the tables need to be on the list because we really can just focus on the chairs and seating elements to get the quantity that we need. And there might be other types of furniture that we want to exclude as well. So by focusing on just seating elements we can be sure that we're focusing on the correct stuff. So we could start modifying this schedule directly but it's probably smarter to right-click it, go to Duplicate, and create a duplicate just in case. So I'm going to right-click that and rename it. And I'll call that Seating Schedule. So now that I have this copy, I'm just going to hold the Control key down and zoom in a few clicks, we can begin customizing it to reflect what we're looking for. So the first thing that we want to figure out how to do is how to get the tables and other non-seating elements off of this schedule. So come over here to the Properties palette and scroll down to the collection of buttons that are here and there's a button next to Filter and I'll click that. And you can see that we can filter by a number of criteria. Now, the list of fields that are available in that filter list only include Level and Comments at the moment, so I suppose we could type something in the Comments field and that would certainly do the trick but what I'd rather do instead is go back to the Fields tab and add in a field that maybe makes a little bit more sense to use here. Now, for whatever reason, Revit doesn't let us filter by Family and Type or Count, so even though those two fields are part of my schedule, it's not letting me use those as filter criteria. I'm going to use the Type Mark. So I'm going to come down here and select Type Mark, add that to the schedule, and then you'll see that it went in right below whatever field I had selected, Family and Type, in this case. I'll go back to the filter tab and now Type Mark is on the list, so I'll choose that. Now, what I've started to do in the exercise file is begin adding type marks to the furniture elements and I've used the letter S for seating for any furniture element that's a seating element. So there's lots of choices here that you can filter on and what I want to do is say, begins with, because if it's a seating element, the way that I'm doing the type mark is by starting with the letter S. So all I'll do is type in, and this case-sensitive, so I'm going to type in uppercase S right there and then I'll click OK. Now, when you do that you can see that so far I've only done one item, booth seating 54 inch long and it's labeled SB, seating booth one. So clearly this is filtering too many elements, so now I need to go back to my model and fill in the rest of the type designations and this schedule will react to those changes in real time. So let's scroll back up here on the list. I'll locate my enlarged dining room plan and I'll zoom in a little bit here. And I could hunt around and start selecting each booth and each chair and go to Edit Type and look to see if they have a type designation but that's kind of the slow way to do it. A faster way to do it would be to tag all of the elements in the view and any that don't have a type designation are the ones that I need to modify. So if we go to the Annotate tab, I can use my Tag All command. When Tag All displays, I'll scroll down and find the furniture category right here and over here on the right-hand side is a drop-down list and you can see that I have more than one choice for furniture tag. So I want to choose the Furniture Tag Boxed, not the Instance Tag. So the Instance Tag is telling me the table number but it's the Furniture Tag that I want to see because that will tell me the type designation. And then I'll click OK and it will add a tag to each piece of furniture. Now, you're seeing all of these tags appear and it looks like a very daunting task but it turns out that it's actually really just two items that we need to modify. So I'm going to select this one right here and then I'll select the tag that's associated with it, click right on the label, SB2 for seating booth two, and press Enter. Revit will ask me if it can apply that value to all instances of that type and I'll say Yes. And notice that filled in for all of the remaining booths. I'll select one of these tags next, click the question mark, SC1, seating chair one, press Enter, answer Yes, and that fills in everywhere else. So it really looked kind of like a big task but it was actually quite simple because I really only had two different kinds of furniture visible here. So if I go back to my seating schedule, you can now see that several items have filled in on both the first and the second floor and here's all of their type mark designations. Now before you say okay that's great we're done and report to your owner that you can seat 162 people, we've got one more wrinkle to deal with. The booths can potentially seat multiple persons. So we can't just count those one for one. That would work fine for the Breuer chairs but we need to do something a little different for the booth seating. So what we're going to do is come over here and edit the button next to Fields. And right here in the middle of the dialog is a new parameter icon. I'll click that and we can add a custom parameter to this schedule and I'm going to call this, Number of Persons. For the type of parameter, I want to set that to an integer. So that's just going to be a whole number. And then it's very important that we set that as a type parameter. If I set it as instance, I'm going to have to go through all 162 seating elements and set that value over and over again which would kind of defeat the purpose. But doing it at the type level, I'll only have to do it once for each type. So I'll click OK. So I'll go ahead and move that up to just below the count and I'll click OK. So now I have this Number of Persons field right here and I can edit it directly in the schedule. So for the 54 inch booth seating, I can accommodate two persons, so I'll put in two and press Enter. Revit will tell me that applies it to type and I'll click OK. For the 72 inch, I can accommodate 3 persons and I'll enter that. For the Breuer chair, it's one per and notice that that would fill in on the upper floor as well and I'm done. Now, if you want, you can format this column, change it to right justification and then, very important right here, we're going to choose calculate totals. Now, by doing that, currently it says three, two, and one, but when I click OK, notice that it now takes the count, multiplies by the values that I input and gives me the total number of persons here and the total number for the entire building here. So I now can go to my building owner with confidence and tell them that their restaurant can seat 193 people.