Friday, September 26, 2008

Revit MEP - Panel Schedule Export

Panel schedules are a very special schedule. It is really multiple "schedules" compiled into one. In fact they aren't even called or located with schedules, they are Reports. These reports and their data are pretty well "trapped" in Revit. Thus far I know that you can:

Export to a cad file (from a sheet)
Publish to a 2D DWF (from a sheet)
Print to a PDF (if you have a pdf driver)
Capture an image (if you have software or just print screen)

A cad file format will result in a 2D lines and text.

A 2D DWF will...well, be in dwf or dwfx format. It doesn't offer much from this point unless another application can do "something" with the DWFx format.

Printing to a PDF will result in a pdf but you may also find that Revit stores an html formatted version first in this folder location:

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Local Settings\Temp

Here's where it might get interesting. I was able to open this html file in the Open Office Writer application and it looked like this.

It is a table of data. Fwiw, I'm not currently using Office applications so I couldn't test bringing it into Excel or Word but I imagine you could have some success getting the data from the temp html file into them. When I tried to open the html file in Open Office Calc I got this.

You might also have some data extraction options if you use Adobe products but I'm not familiar with which one you'd need for the best options. I use Snag IT and there are some nice text capture add-ins for it that will permit you to select a panel view to extract the text but then you've got to spend some time reformatting.

They could make this easier?

4 comments:

Erik said...

Can you post that html file? It could be cool to play with.

Steve said...

Hi,
The temp file is posted here:

http://www.aecadvantage.com-a.googlepages.com/PStemp.htm

Jake Boen said...

This is another reason for "Graphic reports" Perhaps annotation symbols w/ parameters that tie back to the model or family parameters.

Anonymous said...

i only skimmed this post, so not sure if the problem is incomplete info within the temp\ file, or in the manner of opening that file... it looks like integers are lost when they follow "forward slash (/)" within a field?
there are xml editors oss, freeware/lite..