Revit Multiplies Text at Will

[annl]

Has anyone ever seen issues where Text / Annotation duplicates a number of times for the same text entry? Jpeg image attached. Had Autodesk investigate our model, but they have no explanation. These are text / annotation objects and can be deleted, but we suddenly over the course of 3 days had hundreds of multiple entries in our model. Specific to sheet views, all types -- detail views were the worst, but they have the most text. We can go in to each view and delete the multiple entries with Modify. Central file affected, all users expereince the problem. Very time consuming. Audit done with no improvement. Fresh central file and user files, again no improvement. Warnings not specific to related objects. Journal not specific.

Hoping someone has seen this and can offer thoughts on preventative approaches. We are an office completely committed to Revit, so there is no retreat.

Thank you. This is a great community of users. Probably someone has some insights.

Ann

[sjsl]

Never, in 5 years of using Revit.

[DaveP]

We've got (at least) one project that I've seen that happen on.
My suspicion is that is happened when people were Copying & Pasting from one View to another.
It looks to me like if you go into an overall View (this is in the days before Dependant Views) and copy, say, your Room Tags, then go to Paste it into another View that's cropped, ALL of the tags get pasted. Even the ones that you don't see because they are cropped. Then later you go delete the Tags & copy them again, you don't delete many of them because they are outside the Crop Region

[annl]

That sounds like something that would happen in our environment. Thanks! I'll put the description to the Revit group and see if that was what they were doing.

Appreciate it.

[SalubraSubaru]

I know this is an older thread, but I've had this same problem recently, and I'm hoping someone has some insight to this now.
The first time this happened my thought was a user error, where someone may have “selected all instances” and copied. But shortly after we had another entirely separate project do the exact same thing, which makes me second guess my first thought that it was a user error. The text is duplicated in all views, elevations, sections, details, plans. If anyone has any ideas as to what is causing this ordeal it would very helpful.

I've also attatched a screen capture of what's going on.

[Calvn_Swing]

Is there a user that is on both projects?
Do your users talk to each other?

I've never had anything similar happen to text, but I'm used to this on model objects. People don't realize that select all instances selects all instances in the whole model not just in their active view. I'd kill for Autodesk to give us one more level in that context menu (like with Hide in View) so users would see that Select All Instances can mean a lot more than they realize. You have to remember that coming from a CAD background where select all instances would only select what was in that one file into Revit where it is all in the same place can be confusing on many levels. I'd almost bet money that you've got a user that doesn't realize this yet, and selected all instances in a view to copy text in one view, and then pasted it in another view not realizing his mistake. The three/four duplicates is a telltale sign. They try once, it doesn't work. They try again, it doesn't work. They call a friend and show them it doesn't work... All of a sudden you've got a bunch of duplicate text all over the place.

Good luck with the clean up!

[SalubraSubaru]

Is there a user that is on both projects?
Do your users talk to each other?

The project teams are completly different. The only reason why I thought it might be something else other than "select all instances" was the fact that the problem occurred at similar times in two completly different projects, this just seemed like such a coincidence.

[Calvn_Swing]

All it takes is one phone call. We've got 16 projects in process currently. I had one guy from our first project tell one guy in a newer project to draw lines for blocking instead of telling them to use detail components for blocking and (I'm not kidding) it only took three days to have 6 different projects in three different offices drawing blocking with lines and masking regions in the projects instead of using the detail components we loaded into the template. Bad news travels fast, bad Revit advice travels even faster...

[annl]

I thought I'd add an entry to this thread that I originated. It may contribute a solution to anyone who experiences this problem in the future. We never had a definitive on what caused our multiple text entries, but did determine it was a specific text style that multiplied. In the text style name there was a "+" plus sign. Renamed all text styles so that no "+" was in the name. ... Never saw the problem again.

May be coincidence, I never took the time to test extensively. Thought it might be worth mentioning because if you do see the problem it can be a lot of grief.