The Recent Files screen and the Application menu

- In this movie we're gonna talk about two important aspects of the user interface in Revit, the Recent File screen which greets you when you first launch the product and is what I'm showing you onscreen right now and the Application Menu which is in the upper left-hand corner adorned by the Revit logo icon and it's akin to kind of like a file menu. You can perform similar functions using both of these interface elements. And so let's just kinda look at an overview of what each one of capable of. So in the Projects Area at the top we have some links here on the left.

So we can use this one to open an existing file, we can use this one to create a new file and then these items here are customizable and allow you to create new files based on predefined templates. So, if I wanted to create a file from the Construction Template versus, say, the Structural Template I could choose the various links. If the template that you want to use is not listed in one of these four choices then you can simply click the new link here and browse to the template that you want. Now, next to that over to the right you have the most recently opened files that you've opened on your copy of Revit.

So if you want to work on the same file again you can just simply click one of the icon links over there at the right and re-open that file. Now beneath that you have a similar structure for Family Files. So, most of the work you're gonna do is in a project file in Revit, but Family Files are like individual objects and elements that you'll place within your projects. And so if you wanna open up a Family File directly there's links there to open, to create new ones and also the recent families. On the far right-hand side there's a Resources Area and you can use that to access certain aspects of the Help Menu and the Help System and even some Getting Started videos.

So feel free to explore those elements. Now here with the Application Menu, when you open that, it has many of the commands you would expect in a typical file menu. You can create new files, you can open existing files, you can save, you can print, you can export. Many of these items here on the Application Menu actually have a small little arrow right here. And you can see that if I hover over it for just a second or two it actually expands out a broader menu. So, let me try that again. Let me move away and you can see here that there's New and I can just click it to open the new dialog or if I hover over it it'll give me other options.

So, specifically I could create a new project or a new family or a new conceptual mass and so on. Now, if you just click the link it will open up a dialog. In this case opening up a dialog to let me choose an existing file that I wanna open. I'll go ahead and cancel that. Now, if you don't have any of the items on the menu highlighted, on the right-hand side it's gonna actually show you a list that can be one of two things. At the moment I have it set to show me the recent documents. So this reiterates the same items that I had here in the background in the Recent File screen.

Those are just the most recently opened files. Now, there's room here for a lot more than just four. If I had opened up more than four files recently they would all be listed there on the list. Now, if you're working on a project for a long period of time and you wanna keep it on the list, there's actually this little push-pin icon right here and you can click that an it will keep that item pinned to the list and it will not scroll off the list as you open up other files. And then finally, down here at the bottom of the Applications Menu there are two buttons, there's the Options button which we'll talk about in a future movie and we can also use this button right here to actually exit out of Revit when we're done work for the day.

So you can create new or open existing Revit files using either the Application Menu or the Recent File screen. The Application Menu has a few additional items like saving and exporting and these are all the standard file access operations that you would expect to find in most software programs.