Introducing the interface - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we're taking a quick tour of the Revit user interface, and we'll start here on the home screen, which greets you when you first launch the software. The home screen is organized into two primary areas. There's this gray column on the left, which contains commands to open or create new families and models. It also contains tabs to switch between the recent file screen on the right or the Autodesk Projects interface, or even My Insights. There's some help links down at the very bottom. And finally in the middle there is this new Revit home toggle switch. Now if you want to see the difference between the new Revit home and the previous Revit home, you can flip the switch and you'll notice that it's all the same essential elements on the home screen. They're just organized a little bit differently between the two versions of the home screen. Now I prefer the new Revit home, so I'm going to switch back to that. On the right hand side of the screen, we have the recent files area. It's exactly like it sounds. These are all the files that you've accessed recently on your computer. So naturally what you see on your screen might vary from what I see on mine, depending on which files you've opened recently. Now we can organize this as a list view or a grid view. Keep in mind, I'm in the new Revit home, so it varies a little bit in the older style, you can organize this by name or by type. You can search for files over here. So there's a variety of things you can do to kind of get to the file that you're looking for. When you find a file that you want to open, you can simply click on it to begin opening that file. So I'm going to open up the sample architectural model that comes with the full version of the software. If you're using Revit LT, or for some reason you don't see the sample architectural model on your home screen, you can go back to the previous video where I talked about how to access that file in both the full version of Revit and Revit LT. To learn more about how to get to this file, when it opens, it's a read only file. So you need to click this option right here to continue opening the file read only. And if for some reason you don't have access to this file, you can open any file you like to explore the user interface. This is the primary user interface of Revit, and there's several areas here that I want to point out to you. Starting in the very top right hand corner is the quick access toolbar. And just think of that as a shortcut toolbar that has many commonly used commands. Beneath that is the ribbon. Ribbon interface is very common in many different software packages. And so you can see that we have various tabs for the different tool sets that are available in Revit, like architecture structure and precast and so on. I'm going to go back to architecture. Now, one of the things you'll notice about my ribbon is most of my commands are grayed out and unavailable. And the reason for that is because I'm currently in a sheet file. So right here it says that I'm on the cover sheet, and here on the properties pallet it says, that that is a sheet. Now the properties palette is an interactive part of the user interface that changes depending on what you're doing. So a simple way to demonstrate that is to switch views. So right beneath the properties palette is the project browser, and we use the project browser to access different views or drawings. You could think of them as within our project. So notice here that in the project browser, I've got this floor plans branch, and in that branch I have several different floor plans. So I'm going to double click L1, which is going to open up that floor plan view as its own tab here in my user interface. Notice that a few things have changed when I did that. Over here on the properties palette, it now says floor plan instead of sheet. And up on my architecture ribbon, you can see that all those tools which were previously grayed out and unavailable are now available for use. Now you could see this again by just clicking back to the cover sheet. All the tools are grayed out and then back to L1, and they become available. Beneath the project browser in the lower left hand corner of the screen is the status bar. At the moment it says click to select. But if I move my mouse around any of the elements on screen, you're going to begin to see different messages appear here. Right now it says something about grids, and over here it says something about furniture. And right here it says something about views. So depending on what you're doing on screen, you'll get different little tips and messages appearing there at the status bar. So it's a good idea to kind of just pay attention to that area because sometimes it can be really useful information that Revit is reporting back to you. Now, speaking of tips, all of these tools that we see here on the ribbon have little tool tips associated with them. And one of the features of the tool tips is it will have a text description of that tool, but it will also be accompanied by some sort of illustration or in some cases even in animation. So if I go to the modify tab, you can see an example of an animated tool right here. Now, those animations could be a really nice way to not only understand what the tool does, but also how to use it. The final part of the user interface that I want to point out to you at this time is this little floating toolbar. Over here on the right hand side, this is the navigation bar, and there's a little fly out on here with different types of zoom commands. Now we're going to cover all of these zoom commands in a future video, but for now, I just wanted you to be aware that this navigation bar exists over here and how to access it. And let's say I wanted to use that command zoom-in region. I would click on that little green rectangle icon there, and then just drag out a rectangle on screen and it will zoom in on that area of the view. So feel free to explore the user interface further here in this file. And when you're done, you can simply close the file. So we're going to do that by going to the file menu and choosing close. And if it asks you to save, simply say no. Remember, the files read only anyway, so if you did try and save it, it would force you to rename it and put it in a new location. But in this case, there's no need to save. We just were using it as a way of getting comfortable with the user interface.