How to swap all instances of one family for another

[Damo]

Here’s the scenario.

You are working on the feasibility proposal, or the Planning Application drawings, and you haven’t yet specified your sanitaryware, so you use a generic suite. Your project is a multi-storey apartment containing many bathrooms.

After you receive your planning approval and progress onto to the Contract Documents stage you eventually will choose the actual sanitaryware your client wants installed. How do you go about deleting all the generic baths and replacing them with the new bath family?

Go to the Project Browser, scroll down to Families, expand the ‘Plumbing Fixtures’ heading and again expand the ‘bath’ or ‘tub’ sub-heading. Now right-click on the generic bath you wish to remove and choose ‘Select all Instances’ for the pop-up menu.

All instances of the old bath is now selected throughout the project and is noted in the Type Selector. Click the down arrow in the Type Selector and choose your new bath family, and all old bath instances will be changed to the new bath family.

But then again, you all probably knew this anyway.

[Phil Palmer]

Good tip Damo

I had a bad one last week though where 'someone' had done a family of a table as a generic model. Loaded in the correct Furniture catagory table but could NOT do what you say because you cant swap different family catagory types this way (They dont appear in the pull-down)
Got around it though with a few more steps

[J. Grouchy]

Got around it though with a few more steps

Reminds me of the famous cartoon (http://www.thegiftedchildlearning.bigstep.com/Images/miraclelx.jpg) where two mathematicians stand before a blackboard on which a series of equations are written. In the middle of the blackboard, separating two blocks of equations, are the words: "Then a miracle occurs." The caption under the picture reads: "I think you should be more explicit here in step two."

Share your steps with the group. :)

[Phil Palmer]

Firstly I had to change the Furniture family to a 'generic model' catagory family
Then load in and do the swap-out as damo explained.
Then changed the family back to the correct furniture family and re-loaded into the project and all was well.

Sorry about that !