Using the exercise files - Revit Tutorial

- [Narrator] If you have access to the exercise files for this course, you can download them to your desktop as I've done here. In this folder, I've placed a couple Revit projects, and you'll also see some folders. The Links folder contains just linked files that will be used by our main central file, and our main central file is in the root of the folder. Now, accessing a central file that has been moved or relocated can be a little bit tricky in Revit, so because you're downloading the central file from the exercise files download and unzipping it to your desktop, Revit will consider that this file has actually moved. So, what I wanna do right now is go through the steps that you need to follow to re-save this file as a central file. If you don't follow these steps, then the steps that will follow in the later videos in this course will not work. So, make sure you follow this process before you continue. So, to do that, I'll switch over to Revit. And, here in Revit, we wanna use the Open command and locate the central file. Now, you can use the Open link here under Projects. You can use the icon up here on the Toolbar. You can even go to the Application menu and open Project. What you don't wanna do is use any of these shortcut icons here on the Recent Files screen. That will not give you the desired effect. So, make sure you're using one of the Open commands. In other words, a command that actually displays the open dialogue. You need to be able to see the dialogue and browse to the file. Browse to your exercise files folder, and select, do not double-click, select the WS Office Building file. This is the central file. Now, at the bottom of the window is a worksharing area with two check boxes. Those two check boxes can be in one of three possible states. So, if the two check boxes are both grayed out, you do not have a central model. That is a non-workshare project, so you would just open it normally and you wouldn't have to worry about any of the steps that we're talking about here. If, however, both check boxes are lit up and available to be checked, then you have a central file, and your central model is ready to go. There's no further steps necessary, you can just simply access the file. Finally, if the Detach from Central check box is available, but the Create New Local is grayed out, then you do have a central model. However, it must be re-saved, so that's you're way of telling that the model has actually been relocated or copied to a new location, and Revit wants you to re-save it. So that's the situation that we have right here, and you'll notice the Create New Local, which is what I wanna check, is not available, so I have to go forward with re-saving the central file before I'll be able to create a local from it. So, we're going to click Open directly, and open that central model. Now, normally you'd wanna avoid doing this. Okay, that's considered a bad thing to do is to open the central model directly, but in this case we don't have a choice. Now, you'll get this rather intimidating looking warning here telling you essentially what I've just told you, that the central model has been relocated and must be re-saved. And then, when you close that warning, and it goes ahead and opens the model, it will warn you yet again, telling you I still can't find the central model, with another intimidating looking warning, so let's close that one as well. Now, you may also get this warning, which really doesn't have anything to do with worksharing. It's telling me that it could not find some of the references to the linked files, and in this case we can safely ignore this warning and continue. So, at this point, after three intimidating looking warnings, I'm finally in the central model, and all I really need to do here is re-save it as a central. Okay, so that step is actually very easy to do. You go to the Application menu, Save As, Project. Here in the Save As dialogue, you can browse to whatever location you want the central model to live. Make sure it's a location that all users can access, so usually it's gonna be up on your project server. In this case, I will simply save it right back to my exercise files folder, and then you need to click this Options button right here, and check this box to make that a central model after you save. This is very important, 'cause if you don't do that, it's not a central file. Then we'll click OK, and then I'll save the file. Now, at this point, I'm violating the first rule of worksharing. I'm in the central file, so I want to close this file. So I can do that by going to the Application menu and choosing Close, or just simply pressing control W, the keyboard shortcut for that. Now, to verify what I've just done and make sure it all happened correctly, I wanna try and open the central file and see if that Create New Local check box is available. Remember, don't click here, as tempting as that is. You wanna go back to your Open command, a command that actually gives you the Open dialogue that you can browse to the file, single click the file, and if it says Create New Local here, and it's available to check, then you've successfully re-pathed your central file, and it's now ready to go. So, in the remainder of the course, we'll be assuming that you followed these steps so that you can create a new local and work as we expect you to work. If you don't have access to the exercise files, that's okay, you can still follow along by watching how I use the files. In fact, even if you do have access to the files, your screen may not always match mine exactly. This is part of the nature of working in a workshare-enabled project. So don't fret, simply follow along as best you can, and focus on the overall concepts that I will be sharing. In nearly all cases, the exact modifications I make on screen will be secondary to the skills being discussed.