Revit Tips & Tricks

[dbaldacchino]

Hello all!

As your new Tips & Tricks forum manager, I decided to start a thread in an effort to consolidate some of the most new useful T&T that are posted on the Revit forums. If you see something worthy of making this list, feel free to send me a PM with a link and I'll post it here.

You can also visit the Revit Classics Thread. There are some great time-tested goodies there too!

[dbaldacchino]

The solution comes courtesy of Marek Brandstatter in this thread. The key is to register revitpreview.dll properly. Follow these steps to fix the issue once and for all!

NOTE: The path to the dll file has to match your installation path, so make sure to use the correct folder name for Revit Structure and Revit MEP.

[dbaldacchino]

This clever tip is brought to you by Revitator and you can read it in this thread. Sure, it's a workaround, but at least there's a way to do it! Now if someone could create a tool with Revit's API to do this....

UPDATE: If you're a subscription customer, you can install the Revit Subscription Advantage Pack and you'll find a tool that converts between the two types of lines. So the workaround is no longer needed. Thanks Factory!

[dbaldacchino]

I came across this tip and just had to post it in our forums. Credit goes to Harlan Brumm of the blog Revit Clinic. I didn't know (or forgot!) that you could change the behavior of an Array after creating it; ie: changing the behavior from "move to 2nd" to "move to last" and vice versa.

[dbaldacchino]

I'm not taking credit for this, even though I posted it The idea to write it up came after this blog post juggled my memory, and I thought it would be useful to list it here as I know I've used this technique in the past. So let's all thank Mike Hacker of the blog Revit @ Waterman for this tip!

[dbaldacchino]

This can easily fit right in at the top of the Classics list, but it is still so relevant that I decided to place it here instead.

The clever solution comes courtesy of Scott Hopkins in this thread, complete with a pdf tutorial that will explain the "bananas" out of the process

[dbaldacchino]

It is a shame that Revit doesn't have this tool built-in right out of the box. But thanks to the great sharing spirit of AUGI, we can still perform this elementary task by using the API tool that GuyR posted in this thread.

Thanks also to Danny Polkinhorn that started this thread and contributed his work back when we had Revit Building 8.1, Revit Structure 2 and Revit systems 1 (I think!).

UPDATE: If you're a subscription customer, you can install the Revit Subscription Advantage Pack and you'll find a Find/Replace text tool. Thanks Factory!

[dbaldacchino]

Once you type in a value for a parameter, Revit will "suggest" it in the future as a result to help you save time as you input data. However there are times when you know that a particular value is not being used in the project, yet it is still suggested. So where is this hidden and how do you get rid of it?

This tip comes to us courtesy of vger94 in this thread. The hiding place turns out to be in the View Templates!

[dbaldacchino]

Hopefully you know that when you right-click on an object and pick the "Select all instances" option, you end up with a selection set of all types in the project and not in the view only. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to do that though? Well, as we await for better functionality in Revit, you can follow this clever tip as brought to you by Wes Macaulay and you can read it in this thread.

EDIT: In Revit 2011, there is now an option to select all instances visible in view.

[dbaldacchino]

Short & Sweet...hold the Ctrl button while rotating or mirroring.

Kudos to aaronrumple who shared this gem in this thread.