Starting View

I was reviewing old posts for something I thought I wrote about Starting Views. I was befuddled when I didn't find anything. I guess that's to be expected when I write things here and on several other webs sites like AUGI, RevitForum, and Autodesk Newsgroups. Enough about my confusion. Since I don't seem to have one already, here's one now.

Revit developers observed that users were creating simple drafting views that contained some project information and then encouraging or insisting users remember to open this particular view when they saved and closed their projects. This way when someone opened a project for the first time they'd always be greeted by this special view. It also takes Revit less time to open a simple view with no model representation involved. In response they introduced the Starting View as a feature. This special view can be assigned to any view including a sheet view.

Initially people were pleased and just referenced the view they were already using. Then some began experimenting with other view types. The Sheet View is particularly useful because it can use a custom title block family to provide the framework we might want for our Starting View, imagine the office bulletin board with a variety of important and often timely info about office parties and upcoming events. In the context of a project that means we can reference actual project information through labels/parameters instead of having people type some of this same information into text. This connection to live data is a natural progression, even expectation.

More recently Andre Carvalho shared (at RevitForum, see link below) how he uses a linked project file to manage project notes that need to be visible to projects that have several or many models or even expand beyond one project to all projects in the office. He can update the master project file and since all the related projects have this file linked into them the information is updated automatically for him each time any project file is opened. Pretty clever stuff, working within the confines of the tools we've got. If you'd like to read more CHECK IT OUT.

If you aren't taking advantage of Starting Views, let me encourage you to consider doing so.