From the course: Revit 2021: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial and Metric)

The Recent Files screen - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2021: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial and Metric)

Start my 1-month free trial

The Recent Files screen

“

- [Instructor] In this video I want to talk about the Recent Files screen, which is the screen that will greet you when you first launch Revit. So, I have Revit launched and this is the first time I've launched it after installation and I'm seeing the current screen. So, your screen might look similar if you've just installed Revit. Now, if you haven't just installed Revit, then you most likely won't see this message over here on the right hand side. This is a new feature that allows you to set up a workspace profile at the time of installation. So the way this works is you could click the Start button here and it would walk through a little wizard and it would ask you some questions about what items you want to see in your personalized workspace and it would allow Revit to then hide some of the user interface items that you're not interested in. So, if you want to run through this wizard, it's as easy as clicking the Start button here, then you can answer a few basic questions, like for example, I could say well, my field is architecture and my job role is an architect and view the suggestions and then it says that the workspace that it suggests will hide each of these items. So several of the analysis tools and a few of the various tabs. If I want to give this a try, I can click this button here or I could click No Thanks and what will happen is it will simply load all of the interface items instead of hiding some of them. Now, regardless of what you choose here, you can always go back into your Options later and make changes to this. So, in this case I'm actually going to say No Thanks and do the full interface and let me show you how you could go back later and change your mind. So, what you would do is up here at the very top of the screen there's this Back button here. That would display the ribbon in Revit, then you'd go to the File menu, you'd come down here to Options, and then here in Options on the User Interface tab these are all the items that were suggested in that workspace window. And if I had gone ahead and chosen to accept the workspace it was suggesting, some of these boxes would be unchecked and I could simply recheck them and restore them back into my interface. Because I canceled out of there, you can see that all of the boxes are checked, so I'm actually going to see all of the elements of the user interface. So if you want to compare your interface to mine, you can choose the same checkboxes I have here on my screen, just so that you're seeing something similar on your own screen to what I'll be showing. So, in my case I do not have a customized workspace and I'm showing all of the tabs and I welcome you to do the same. So, because I'm not making any changes here I'll just simply click Cancel and then up here on the Quick Access Toolbar, at the very top, there's the second icon over is called Home or the keyboard shortcut is Control + D and that will take my back to the Recent Files screen. So, here on the Recent Files screen it's organized into a few different areas. On the left we have Models, then Families, and then BIM 360, and there's also a few Help links at the very bottom. Now, some of that is also repeated in the main portion of the screen where it says Recent Files. We also have Models and Families. Now, the way this screen works is if you've previously opened a model or a family, it will appear in the Recent Files area and if you hover over one of these items, it will tell you some information about that file. Now, since I've just installed Revit for the first time what I'm actually seeing here are the sample files that come with the software. So this first item, for example, is the Sample Architectural Project and you could see the path where that is installed when I hover over it. If I move over to one of the other items, you'll see it's a different file with a different path. Now, these are family files down here and we're primarily going to be working with models in this course, so we will discuss the family editor briefly in a later chapter, but for now we'll be focusing on model files. So, you could either click one of the Recent Files icons here to open a file or if the file that you want to open is not listed in the Recent Files area, then you could simply come over here and click the Open button under Models. That would open up a standard Windows Browse menu and you would browse to the location where that file lives and open it that way. Now, you could also do the same thing for family files and for BIM 360 projects, which are projects that are stored in the cloud. So now that you have some idea of how the Recent Files screen works, let's just go ahead and open up any file. I'm going to choose the Sample Architectural Project which is listed right here. Now, if you don't have access to this file, I've provided a copy of it in the Exercise Files or you can just simply open up any Revit project that you like by using the Open link under Models on the left hand side. If you ever need to get back to the Recent Files screen, again, remember that we have that Home icon up here at the top or Control + D and that will simply take you back to the Recent Files screen where you could open up additional files or perform other actions that are available to you here. Now, keep in mind that switching over to the Recent Files screen does not actually close the other project. So if I click the Back button here, notice that the project that I opened is still open in the background. So, the Recent Files screen is always accessible just by toggling back and forth between your currently open project and that Recent Files. Now obviously, the user interface that we see here is quite different when we have a project file open, so we'll begin exploring the nuances of that in the next video.

Contents