From the course: Creating Construction Documents with Revit

Pro tip: Organize the Project Browser - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Creating Construction Documents with Revit

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Pro tip: Organize the Project Browser

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- [Instructor] Let me introduce you to the first of the many insider tips that I will be sharing with you as we go through this course. These are tips that help me to be more efficient, more productive, more knowledgeable as I utilize Revit to its fullest potential. So let's start with a way to make it easier and quicker to access information in your project. We can do that with the Project Browser. The Project Browser is a road map. This guides you towards information in your project, and this is done by organizing information on the Project Browser into categories. And those categories can be for sheets, they can be for views, they can be for schedules. So to take a closer look at how to do this, let's get into Revit. Now, in Revit, when we look at the Project Browser, we now see that the views are organized by floor plans, ceiling plans, elevations. We have got another collection for families, another collection for groups. Let's see how it is that we can customize this. If I go to the View tab and to the User Interface, I can go to Browser Organization. And in this dialog box, I see that there are three different tabs to control views, sheets, and schedules, which means that I can set up separate Browser Organization schemes for view, sheets, and schedules. Right now, let's start off with sheets. I click on New. I set up a new View Organization in the browser. When I accept the name, Revit gives me another dialog box. Now, the Filtering tab. This is something that needs to be used very, very carefully. This allows you to control what you see in the Project Browser. You don't have to see everything in the project in the Project Browser. You can set it up to show specific subsets of information. So for instance, I can set up my Project Browser to show me only the views that have been created for new construction. In that case, the Project Browser will only show me the new construction views and not the existing views, which may be helpful when you're working on a remodeling project. Right now, we're going to take a look at Grouping and Sorting. This is a powerful feature, one of my favorite things to do, and this helps to organize the information in the Project Browser, make things easier to access. So I can group views. Right now, we're in View Organization. I can take the views, organize them by family, family type. Again, I can organize them by phase. So I can have the views for existing construction grouped together in one category. I can have the views for a new construction group into another category. And once I've got that done, let's do this with phase, and then I can organize these views maybe by view name. Let's organize them by sheet number. Now, how easy is that? How convenient is that? You have got all the views organized by sheet number. It makes it so much easier for you to see the views, see which sheet that they're on, makes it so much easier for you to organize to navigate your way through the project. Once again, this is something that I've found really, really helpful. Now, I need to check the checkbox in order to make this active. I can do the exact same thing for sheets. I can set up a new Browser Organization scheme and I can filter the sheets. Criteria remain the same. I can group them. And you can also create custom categories by creating shared parameters. Shared parameters are a topic for a whole new conversation, which we can deal with later on. My favorite thing out of this is being able to organize schedules. You've got schedules for doors, for windows, for rooms, for finishes. There are so many things that you need schedules for. And rather than have this huge long list of schedules that you would need to scroll through, if I create a Schedule Organization scheme, and I can group these by category. So if I have got multiple door schedules, they will be put into one category. If I have multiple room schedules, now multiple room schedules could be there for room finishes, for instance, or just for the rooms. Then, I can group them together in one category. So in closing, here's another really quick pro tip for you. This helps you to access information in your Project Browser without too much scrolling. It's not mandatory, it's just something to make your work a lot easier.

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