Recent Files Screen and File menu

- [Instructor] Let's begin exploring the Revit user interface. I'm going to start with the Recent Files screen. Now the Recent Files screen is this gray tinted background screen that displays when you first launch the software. It's organized into three basic areas, Projects, Families, and Resources. Projects and Families give you access to those kinds of files. Now most of the work you're going to do on a day to day basis is going to be in a project file, that's where you build your model and create all your views, and present all your information. So, over here in the Projects area, we can open existing projects, we can create new ones, or we can even choose from some predefined templates to get us started.

Next to that you'll have the four most recently opened files that you worked on and you can click any of those links as a shortcut to get back to that file. Now, the Families area is similar. We can open existing families or we can create new ones or we can open up recently edited families. Families are individual components that you would use within your project files, so, if you need to create a custom component, then you'd use the Families area, otherwise, most of the time you're going to be working with the options in the Projects area. Now on the right hand side, you've got the Resources area and that's mostly links to the help system and Essential Skills Videos and I do recommend you spend some time clicking through each one of these links here and seeing what resources are available to you and watching some of those videos.

Now, we can get to the same functions for opening and creating files and families on the File menu. So the File menu is located right here in the upper left hand corner and you can see that the first two commands are New and Open. Now the way that this menu works is it's organized into two sections, you've got the left hand section and the right hand section. If you click directly on the command, it will just run that command. So, New Project is what it would do by default. I'm going to cancel that. Or if I click on the Open command, it would go to the Open dialog, and I'm going to cancel that.

But if you hover over one of these commands and wait for a second, it will actually display options over on the right hand portion of the menu. So, I could specifically say I want to create a new project or a new family or a new conceptual mass, as an example. Or under Open, I could open a project or open a family or open up an IFC file. So, if you want a little bit more control over what kind of file that you're opening or creating, then just use these small little menus over there and, again, you just hover over it to get that menu to display. Now, if you don't have any command highlighted, at the very top here are two little icons here.

Now the one on the right is Open Documents and as you can see right now that list is empty because I don't have anything open, but if I had files open, they'd all be listed there and I could use that to switch between the various views and files I had open. The recent files list, on the other hand, compiles a list of all the files that I've opened up recently. Now, it will just keep adding to this list until it runs out of room and then it'll take the ones that wee opened long ago and start scrolling those off the list in favor of the ones that we're opening up more recently. If you want to keep a file on the list permanently, you can use the little push pin icon like I've done right here.

So any one of these files you could use the little push pin to pin it to the list and then when you no longer need it you could unpin it, so that's a way that you could kind of manage that list. Now, the file menu has more than just New and Open, we can, of course, Save, Save As, we can export files, we've got Suite Workflows we can print and published, so all of the standard file management commands that you might have access to in any program are available here in Revit on the same file menu. At the bottom of the file menu is the Options button, these are options that are available broadly to the entire Revit software package, so you're welcome to configure some of those if you like and then, of course, you can use this button right here to exit out of Revit when you're done work for the day.

So, you're going to use either the Recent Files screen that greets you when you first launch Revit or the File menu to open existing files, to create new files, or to save and print those files.