Learn / Advanced Mechanical Equipment Workflow Videos
Creating Text Based Shared Parameters
Mechanical · Shared Parameters and Schedules · 4m
This lesson teaches you how to create text-based shared parameters in Revit, essential for managing equipment schedules effectively. You will learn to define parameters such as airflow, ESP, RPM, and weight, and how to integrate these into your project for enhanced clarity.
Additionally, the lesson covers best practices for handling text inputs in schedules, the limitations of numerical operations in Revit, and the importance of using accurate engineering data for mechanical and plumbing families.
Transcript
So I'm gonna go back in the fields, and I'm going to take all of these out. K. So let's go back into the family, and we're gonna create some new parameters. And so shape parameters, select. And now that we started this, you know, these are actually real units. If I wanna make a new one, I'm gonna have to go at EF airflow text. K. Create a new one. E f ESP text. E f RPM text and e f wait text.
Oops. E f wait text. There we go. Okay. And then I can push text in instance other push And see, I I misspelled that. Now that I've misspelled it once, misspelling is gonna be with me for the rest of my life. Good thing this is just a demonstration. Make sure I hit the right thing. New parameter. Select RPM text.
Parameter. Grab that final one. Beat text. There. Okay. Now I'm gonna push the project. K. It didn't really matter which option I selected there. Okay. So now we go back to the exhaust fan schedule, and we can add those parameters. Text. Text. Add in. Okay. And now we can type in we can type in 500.
We can type in 250500. We we could type in, you know, not applicable. We can type in whatever we want. We can also type in nothing. It's just beautiful to be able to type in nothing, and our, you know, our schedules won't look like garbage. However, you can't we you can't trick Revit in any way that I'm aware of to, like, add all those numbers up. So let's say that you had a big old long schedule, and it said they all had the various air flows. This is various CFMs, and you wanted to add that value up. You you could push it to Excel, convert string to number, and add it up in Excel. So that is not that great.
I just a note about the about the shared parameters and text. We do use a number of shared parameters that are linked to real engineering data. So for example, our electrical families, they're full of good, correct engineering units, parameters that understand that they're, you know, they're both dampers, they're watts, they're phase poles, all that sort of stuff. You can't really do the magic of Revit without Revit Electrical without having good units for that. So we've got that.
And we have some other units for mechanical and plumbing as well that do help you work with some of that stuff. But, again, our our primary focus is being able to make drawings documents that look good, and we can make them quickly. And using text for most of the equipment schedule cells is the way to go.