Thursday, May 29, 2014

Revit MEP - Choosing a Panel

This is a quick tip I picked up eavesdropping on a conversation with Martin Schmid (Autodesk). When you create a circuit and use Select Panel the list of panels in the drop-down on the Options Bar sorts the panels based on their proximity to your circuit's elements. That's pretty subtle and I never paid close enough attention to notice. I love subtle stuff!

5 comments:

Todd M Shackelford said...

Steve, I tested this in Revit 2014 and got mixed results. I haven't figured out the pattern yet, but it might have something to do with when panels were created as well. In any case, it is not always true that the panels are in order of proximity in my test.

Unknown said...

I know that Autodesk thinks that sorting by distance makes the most sense and for small projects with one or two dozen panels it probably does, because even if the panel is not close by you can read through the list quickly. Unfortunately until you do a large project with 100+ panels and find the list has panels from the floor above and floor below near the top and panels you need somewhere else, or that emergency panel is way on the other side of the building and is lost in the unsorted mass of panels in the list, you end up spending a lot more time looking for the panel you need, than just typing in the panel name.

Steve said...

My source is part of the team responsible for the product. That said, proximity or the "closest" may be an oversimplification of the priority Revit uses to compile a list of panels to offer us on the Options Bar.

troy said...

I also would prefer it to be alphabetical. To be honest I usually just click on the panel instead (assuming it is on the same floor) instead of using the drop down box.

Steve said...

Yeah, me too...click on the panel instead. Whenever they make a decision like this "under the hood" it is inevitable that the logic doesn't play in somebody's ballpark...