importing text

[CCI Design]

Can anyone tell me the best way to put word or excel docuents into Revit. I want to have our receptionist type up specifications to be included on a drawing sheet.

[beegee]

You can either copy and paste direct or else make a jpg , load it into a drafting view and drop that onto a sheet. Obviously the second method retains all formatting, tabs, borders etc.

[jwilhelm]

Text formatting in Revit is less than stellar, I have formally requested the ability to import word files, we will see if anyone is listening. My opinion is that the jpeg is preferable, I have tried cutting & pasting but formatting the text in Revit is a nightmare, and of course if you wanted to highlight a title it would have to be a seperate text block with its own font defined.

[SCShell]

Hey there,

I do both; however, I usually cut and paste from Corel (WordPerfect 11).

The other really cool way to approach notes on a sheet (mainly standard sheet spec type notes which are re-used project to project) is to create a generic text annotation family for each spec section, numbering/naming it so that it follows whatever format you are using. Once created and saved, load it into your project as needed as an annotation family, and drag them onto the sheet.

For copy and paste, here is how I do it: (maybe not the right way, but it works!)
First, place a "text" prompt on the drawing sheet where you want to start the notes (upper left corner), then you can paste onto the sheet. If you don't start with the text prompt in Revit, the paste clip board will not activate. Once you have pasted, you can change the font and size, drag the overall text box shape handles to fit your column or whatever sized space you need to fill. You can still cut and paste after this point within Revit if you need to move the bottom part up to a new column. You also can do "simple edits" within Revit; however, you do loose most of your format controlling stuff like 'indent paragraphs' etc. (but I work around that.)

The other issue to learn is that the size of the "text block" or length of the column changes as you zoom in and out. My rule of thumb is to zoom in really close in order to see where the bottom really is. The other way is to first figure out how many lines of text fit in your column vertically, then copy only that many lines in your word processing program. That way, you know it will fit. (WordPerfect will give you a running count of lines as you scroll down a document.)

Hope this helps
Steve Shell