Revit Frustrations, Adding Shared Parameters, Views Referencing

Let me begin this comment by saying that Revit is a great tool and I am so glad that I changed over from AutoCAD when I did, here comes the ‘but’…..but sometimes there are so many little things that drive me nuts and they seem like they would be a simple fix for Revit to incorporate into their software……

So here are a couple of my frustrations……

Adding Shared Parameters

When I am adding Shared Parameters, in the Parameter Properties dialog box as a default it is set to Project or Family Parameter, and rightly so, but if I need to add a Shared Parameter, first I have to activate the Shared Parameter and then I have to click the ‘Select’ Button.

Why can’t the ‘Select’ button be enabled when first entering the dialog box? This would save a click!

I know it isn't the end of the world, but it gets annoying when you are adding Shared Parameters often……

Views Referencing Sheet

This has been around for a while, and it is still there!!!

On some of our larger projects where we are creating and duplicating lots of views we sometimes get into a situation where when we place a view onto a sheet it doesn’t back reference the sheet we want.

Revit finds the first sheet number in the sheet list that the view is visible in and uses that as the default. Most of the time this is correct, although sometimes the default is not what you want! It is greyed out too, so you can’t manually adjust it.

Why can’t we have a drop down list of all relevant views?

The work around has been around for a while, below is a brief outline on how to fix the problem…..

I like to go to the incorrect referenced sheet and activate the view and then ‘hide in view’ the marker in question. (A lot of the time, even if it is outside a crop boundary it will still show, so you will have to un-crop the view, hide the marker and then re-crop the view)

Keep working through the sheet list with this process until the final view is referencing the right sheet, then you give the view marker crop region a little adjustment, ever so slightly (you can nudge it with the arrow keys).

Then you can go back up the sheet list and ‘Unhide in view’ all of the view markers that need to be turned back on. Because we slightly adjusted the correct view marker the ‘Referencing Sheet’ will stay referencing the view.

The second solution is to not back reference!!! (sometimes this isn't an option, refer to work around 1)

These are just a couple of bugs in Revit that I always have my fingers crossed…..maybe it will be fixed in the next version…..but no, disappointed again!!!

Somehow it seems so much better to write it down and get it out rather than sitting in a corner crying about Revit not playing the way I want!!!