Schedule trickery - How do I get an average of areas?

[PeterJ]

I'm preparing a planning statement and want to show that the splitting of the unusually large plot we are looking at does not substantially effect the grain of the neighbourhood.

I'm using an area plan over the site plan which is covers a wider area and shows all the surrounding plots. Taggig each plot then allows me to summarise them but I can't work out how to extract an average using a schedule. Any thoughts?

[fernando]

property lines??

[dbaldacchino]

I'm not uderstanding the question. What average are you trying to schedule? I thought you want to schedule the areas....am I wrong? Or are you splitting an area in different plots and want to come up with an average plot area?

[beegee]

Export to ODBC.

Perform average calculation in Excel.

Save as jpg and import back into Revit.

[PeterJ]

David - Ten different sized existing plots, what is the average area? I need the question answered so that I can show that when the 700+ m2 plot I am looking at gets cut in two the two resultant plots will still be larger than the prevailing average plot size and thus Mr(s) Planner it ain't overdevelopment in the context of the prevailing grain.

Beegee - Yeah. Arno.

But how about within Revit? I think I need to add more area, hence more plots, to make the argument more compelling. I wanted to keep the calculation pretty much automatic. Incidentally, in this instance I think export schedule is slightly easier than export to ODBC as it creates a simple CSV that excel will read in about three clicks without having to dig through the remainder of the ODBC output.

[dbaldacchino]

I understand now....well, if you do a schedule where you sort/group by Area and use Count and Totals, you will get a tally of the Area and how many plots you have. Unfortunately, I feel Revit still lacks on the analytical side (calculated parameters is one of them), so I'm afraid you have to manually do the calculation. I mean, once you have th total area and the count of spaces you've tagged, then it's just Area/# of spaces. The problem is you'll have to show it somewhere as a piece of text and you'll have to update it manually. I don't know any other way but I don't think it's worth exporting just for a simple division.

Even if say, you had multiple sizes of plots, you could do a key schedule; ex: Plot 1 (between area a and b), Plot 2 (between b and c), etc. Then add the key schedule field to your main schedule. and assign a plot to each space and do a sort/group by plot with a total and count and you'll get total area and count for plot 1, plot 2 etc. Then you'll just manually divide the area and total count for each plot. One other way, which is more automatic than using a key schedule, would be to do a calculated field and a bunch of nested i"f "statements as a formula. "=if(area<b,1, if(area<c, 2, etc.". This way you'll have a column with a number assigned to spaces with areas in a certain range. Then you do the sort/group & area and count on this calculated column as per above.

Where Revit lacks is in making totals, counts, calculated parameters etc. available for calculation within the program itself, and the absence of calculated parameters. Maybe someday :) Hope this helps you a bit.

[PeterJ]

Yes, DB, we've reached the same point pretty much. I have added a colour fill to the area plan and it shows the effect visually very nicely so I'm happy enough with that and a single calculation.