Key / system note philosophy...

[christo4robin]

For a long time I have been opposed to keynoting because of the visual divorce of symbol and description on a sheet. That said, I have recently begun to seriously consider keynoting as a way to clean up the graphics of "busy" drawings. Because I have never used keynotes or system notes, I am curious about other's best practice recommendations. We are a firm doing residential and small commercial work.

Architectural questions...
1. Is there a difference between keynotes and system notes?
2. What are the pitfalls of keynotes?
3. Are you using them differently on different drawing types? (plans, building elevations, building sections, etc.)

Technical questions...
1. What is the method for sorting a Note Block to only show those notes appropriate to a specific sheet?
2. How are you storing your library of key notes? In Revit? Excel?
3. Are you using the default Revit keynote tag? Does the parameter being instance vs. type make a significant difference?

Many thanks for your thoughts!

[SkiSouth]

Thanks for the thread Chris - I think this ought to be good. I too have to now consider these keynotes and will look forward to this discussion.

[GuyR]

I'd wait a few more days and see what's changed in V7. We know there are some changes.

Sheet based notes aren't that hard. Neither is storing them in Excel. But there are issues with both of these and it really would be worth waiting to see if they've improved things in V7 before discussing further.

One of the first things I'll be playing with is keynoting so I'll post what I find.

Guy

[BomberAIA]

I use plan and elevation keynotes based on the CSI Sections...6.01, 6.02....Wood & Plastic Section, etc.

[christo4robin]

Are there any resources for keynotes? I'm thinking of some of the Working Drawing books I've seen before (but don't have around right now). Or some guideline for creating CSI keynotes, etc.

Thanks!

[BomberAIA]

There was a program that was called Con Doc. That is what I based my keynotes on.. Maybe the AIA has a copy of the handout. They sponsored a seminar years ago.

[gregcashen]

Has anyone had a chance to test keynoting in 7.0? Are there any improvements? Would you mind sharing the general workflow for how to use them here?

TIA

[ita]

Greg I found the Keynote tutorial in 7.0 very much more (my mother would have had quite a few words to me about "very much more" - English teacher with books on grammar to her name!!) understandable - which it wasn't for me in 6.0. I now have a better grasp of the concept which I did not before.

BTW, I feel the help and tutorials in 7.0 are clearer and more readily understood. Thank you to the factory for that!!

[gregcashen]

Thanks for the update Ian. I will have to check that out!

[BomberAIA]

The problem w/ Revit keynoting is that once you add a keynote to a view, it appears on all the keynote legends. That is why you have to make different keynotes for plans, elevations, etc. Con Doc had a database which stored all the keynotes. You would scan a sheet and it would display the keynotes you used. Revit needs to thinks about a database that could be in your template or loaded into a project. After Con Doc stop updating or supporting their software, Ketiv (ArchT) had a similar product as a 3rd party overlay for Acad. I still use ArchT for Acad 2000 as a the architecture component.

[GuyR]

The preview guide did say there are improvements but as far as I can tell no changes. Limited testing so far but for me the 2 major issues of automatic sheet recognition and type catalog overwriting haven't changed.

So the sheet based workaround still applies and use TC's with care.

Guy

[PeterJ]

It's very easy to filter keynotes in schedules so I normally have a field in there called sheet or view and when I have all the keynotes ona view I select everything filter to the keynotes and through the properties dialog give them a useful name such as GA Section 1 and then filter the noteblock on that.

[sfraney]

Which Keynote Tut. in v7 are our you using. What's the file name? I can't seem to find it.