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

Recent Files screen and File menu - Revit Tutorial

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

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Recent Files screen and File menu

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- So let's start our look at the Revit user interface with a look at the recent files screen. So the recent files screen is what greets you when you first launch the software. And it's organized into three basic areas as you can see. At the top, we have 'Projects', below that is 'Families', and over on the right-hand side we have 'Resources'. Now most of the time, you're going to work in the projects area, because most of your work in Revit will take in a project file. So to open an existing project, you would use the 'Open' link here, you can create a new project using the 'New' link here, or you can create a new project based on any one of these templates. So if I just simply click the 'Architectural Template' or 'Construction Template', it will create a brand new project based on that template. And this list of templates is something you can actually customize, and put your office standard template there, or change the order of them, or what have you. Now across here, you have these four icons representing the four most recently opened files. So in the previous video, I had this file open for example. So it's the first one listed here on the left. Now in the 'Families' area, we have a similar configuration. We can open an existing family, create a new family, or we can open any recently used families down here. Family files are individual components that get placed into Revit projects. So if you want to work directly on an individual item, you would work in the family editor. Otherwise, most of the work will take place in the project environment. Paralleling all of these commands, we have similar commands on the file menu. So the file menu is in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. And when you click to open it, you'll see on the left-hand side of the file menu are the various commands, 'New', 'Open', 'Save', 'Save As', 'Export', and so on. And then the right-hand side changes depending on what you select on the left. So if I just click a command, it would go right to that command. So if I just clicked it, it would launch the new project dialogue here, which would be the same as clicking this new link here. I'm going to cancel that. If I just click right on 'Open', it will go to the open dialogue. And I'm going to cancel that. But if you instead hover over that item, then it will display a menu on the right-hand side indicating the different kinds of files that you can either create or open. So in the case of 'New', I can create a new project, or a new family, or a new conceptual mass. In the case of 'Open', I could open a project or a family or a building component. So there's different file formats that are supported by Revit. So if you just hover over the command first, it'll display a list exposing those various options. 'Export' works the same way. 'Save As' works the same way. The 'Print' option and 'Save' options are both grayed out at the moment because I'm not in a project. But if I was in a project, I would obviously be able to choose 'Save', and I would be able to use the 'Print' command. Now at the top of this menu are two small icons. This shows the recent documents, and this one shows the open documents. Now I don't have anything open at the moment, so this list is empty. But if I click on the 'Recent Documents' icon, then you can see the same four items that are listed across here in the background. Now this list can be longer than four items, so if I've opened more than four projects, that list will continue to populate until it runs out of room here. Another interesting feature about this list is you've got these push pins over here. So if I want to keep one of these items permanently on list, I can simply push pin it, and it will stay on the list until I no longer need it, and then I can unpin it from that list. If you need to access the overall options for the Revit software, you can click the 'Options' button here, and a multi-tab dialogue will appear with many options you can set. Most of those options are set it and forget it options, and we'll look at those in a future video.

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