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.

Smarter Local Files - Build Checking

When I posted this earlier I didn't really go into much detail about the application. One particularly nice feature that was added by David based upon inspiration from James Vandezande (SOM) was the notion of checking the build of Revit that the user is running compared with the version that was used to create the central/local originally.



David Baldacchino, David Kingham and James Vandeszande have contributed most of the actual code. The AUGI thread and comments on David's blog have provided feedback and some inspiration as well. This is a perfect example of why the Revit AUGI community works!

I must say AutoHotKey is a pretty quick "study". After downloading and installing it I was able to modify the existing script provided by David to do what I needed it to do within 10 minutes.

I still believe Autodesk should enhance this work flow directly themselves but grateful to people like David "squared" and James for creating it, and more importantly, for making it available to the rest of "us".

You can visit the AUGI thread or download the script file from HERE. If you download the script you still need the AutoHotKey software to compile it into an executable file you can use.

For another more recent option, read this MORE RECENT POST.