From the course: Revit 2019: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

Modifying schedule views - Revit Architecture Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2019: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

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Modifying schedule views

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- [Instructor] In this video I want to look at a couple ways that we could modify a schedule. So I'm picking up where we left off in the previous video. So if you're unsure on how to create a schedule or to tile the floor plan in the schedule views next to one another, then just go back and review the previous video. So I have my furniture schedule open on the right-hand side and you could see that I've gone ahead and filled in all of the type mark values, but if you kind of analyze the list you can see that it's all just sort of randomly organized. So what I'd like to do is click into the schedule so I just click right on the title bar here. And when I do that, the properties pallet will adjust to reflect the properties of the schedule. So I'll scroll down and you'll see a series of buttons over here, a series of edit buttons that you can click on to configure the schedule. The one right in the middle is called sorting and grouping so I'll click that and that will display the schedule properties window. Now the last time we were in here was when we created the schedule and we were on the fields tab and that's where we were able to create the fields that we wanted to include as columns in the schedule. But here on sorting and grouping, we can now take those fields and use them as sort or group criteria to reorganize the schedule. So why don't I choose type mark for the sort by and then let's click okay and see what that does. So now the type mark is the sorting criteria and you can see that the list just sorts alphabetically based on the type mark. So that's definitely an improvement. It may not be a real dramatic change, but it definitely is making the schedule a little bit better. Let's see if we can improve it even more. The next thing that we might want to look at doing is possibly providing some separation between the different types of elements. So we can do that by introducing a header. Now when you introduce a header, it'll actually repeat the type mark information for each unique type mark. Now for things like the beds, where we only have one of each, it's not very useful. But in the case of the two chairs or the 10 chairs over here, that starts to be a nice way to visually group them. Now we can add even more space by introducing a blank line, that'll just add a little gap between each grouping. You could see here we have a count column and if you want to know what the grand total is of the entire schedule, then that's available in that sorting and grouping as well, you just check the grand totals box here and then choose the kind of format you'd like that grand total to have and click okay. So if I scroll down, it tells me I've got 26 furniture items in my schedule. Now let's verify that. So I'm going to go into the floor plan and make a selection through the entire floor plan. I'll click the filter button. And what you're going to see here is, there's the furniture category, but hold on a minute, it's telling us we have only 16 pieces of furniture, where this is saying we have 26. So what's happening there? Well Revit's throwing us a little curve ball here, so let's just kind of move this out of the way and see. We've got a table and chairs family here and another one right here. Now this is one table with six chairs, for a total of seven items. This is one table with four chairs, for a total of five items. The filter command is seeing just the parent family, the table and chairs as a single item. And the schedule is actually reaching into that family and seeing the nested chairs as well. Now if you look at the furniture tags, we have a tag for each item, including the nested chairs. So that total matches the grand total on the schedule, so that helps us verify that it is correct, even though the furniture count looked a little suspicious to us. So sometimes it's good to verify, but also you need to investigate when something seems amiss and make sure that you're not misunderstanding the data. Alright let's go back to the schedule. At this point I'm looking at this and I see a lot of redundancy. For example, I've got four night stands over here and do I really need to see four entries of the same thing? So if you decide that you really don't want to see the same information repeated over again multiple times, then what you can do is come over here, back to the sorting and grouping button and you can uncheck itemize every instance. Now this will have a pretty dramatic effect on the schedule, because it will collapse every item down to a single entry and now the count column gets activated. And notice that instead of seeing ten separate Breuer chairs, now I have one line item that says CH2 is a Breuer chair and there are 10 of them. And when I click that line item, notice that it highlights all 10 instances back in the floor plan. So the same is true for those nightstands and anything else that has more than one element. So the only thing I want to say there is just exercise caution because you're now selecting two items or 10 items and when you make an edit, you're editing that many items. So just pay attention to that so that you can be sure that you're editing what you expect. Now at this point you might say that having both the header and the type mark is redundant. So there's two ways we could deal with that. Back to sorting and grouping, one option would be just to remove the header and now we're back to just seeing the type mark. And if you like that formatting then you can move on. Or you could do the opposite, you could put the header back and what you can do is hide the type mark column. Now don't go to fields and remove it. If you remove it, you won't be able to sort and group on it. Instead what you do is go to formatting, select type mark and make it a hidden field. When I do that, it will put the header only and it will remove the redundant field. So I think one or the other of those is what you should do and it's really just a matter of your personal preference. Now, we could format these columns graphically as well. So if I click and drag through the headers, you'll notice that we have some appearance options here on the ribbon. So I can click on font and maybe make them bold, I could change the color, I could increase the size, I could use a different font altogether. I'll just make them bold here. I'll select column B. Now be careful, that just selected all of the furniture, but then I can change the horizontal alignment. These are numerical values, so a right alignment might work a little bit better. However, the column header, I might want that to maintain its previous center alignment. So I can select just the column header and set it back to center. You can add borders around this, you could put shading in the fields, there's all sorts of graphical customizations that you can continue to do to the schedule to make it conform to your liking. So how you exactly format the schedule is not as important as choosing formatting that makes it easy to understand what you have in the schedule. Because really what a schedule is in Revit is it's our window to the information part of our BIM. So when we talk about building information modeling, a schedule is one of the primary ways that you're going to get at that information. So if you can make the presentation of that information legible and easy to understand, it becomes a much more useful tool for you to make better design decisions.

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