Pushing Schedules to Excel and back

Okay. So I've just created a number of instances of my RTU family. Let's say I've got a bunch on a roof, and I want to I've got some data editing to do. I want to I wanna fill this out. Right? Now Revit's not great for data entry. It does some it has some strange bugs. It's slow. You can't do the drag drag and drop down thing. It's not great. And so, like, so, like, for example, here, I want this to be three. I have to come in here and type and I hit enter. Well, RTU three. It's just kind of slow. And then if you're trying to fill this whole thing out, point is is, you know, if you've gotten data in Excel, you wanna get it in here.

Are you are are you relegated to double monitoring and data entry? No. You're not. There there is a link. And, again, multiple plugins that do do this sort of thing for for this. We we use do it's it's got the button sheet link. It allows you to push schedules from Revit to Excel, do data entry, and then push it back in. So I go to the schedules tab, and I've only got one schedule in the family, so I'm just gonna select this one. And then if I'm just gonna do some light data entry, I'm gonna go you can go to the preview edit tab. And this is like Excel Lite.

It's not quite as powerful as as Excel, but it lets you do some things a little bit faster. However, I will push this to Excel, and I will you just select the schedule and you say export, and you can do Excel or Google. I'm gonna do Excel. It doesn't really matter where you save it because the Excel isn't gonna be the source of truth. The source of the truth is gonna be in your in your Revit model for the data.

So I always whenever I push to Excel, I just put them on my desktop, and I delete them once once a day, once a week, whatever. Okay. So, you know, here, I could just do that so I can rename all my RTs easily. That took me half a second, whereas in Revit, it would have taken me a while. A couple things going on here.

The and this is in the this is in this tab here. So the this cell color is type means it's the type value. And we remember that because we set we set these to type. The if there's no coloring, it means it's an instance value. And then gray, and I did this on purpose to demonstrate this, grayed out means parameter does not exist in this family.

So it doesn't matter what I type in here. It won't put any data into the family because there's no share there's no shared parameter in that family to receive the data. So this is another way to kinda quickly QC your schedules and stuff. I do this when developing families for families and schedules for Webex. So I come through in here and and see if I missed any shared parameters. So I missed all of these, again, on purpose so that you could see what that looks like and watch out for it. So in Revit, this would look like if I tried to enter information in here in the Revit schedule, just wouldn't let me enter anything in there. But for us, this stuff, I can. And so if I had a so so what can you do here? Well, you can obviously add things here.

You can convert text to numbers. You can do calculations on it. If you've got all the data in, like, in your old schedules, you can copy and paste it in. Another thing you can do is you could just you could get this you could get this Excel spreadsheet. You could send it to a rep. Say, fill it out. Don't fiddle with any of the columns. Don't change any of that stuff around. Just enter in the data, and they send it back to you. You import, and it's in your project.

Right. So here, you know, I could enter in anything I wanted. So just so that you can see that actually works. I'm not gonna make you watch me do data entry. So I just added updated the brake horsepower, gonna hit save, and close. And then you just come back to import. And I could I didn't have to have this open. I I could've I could've closed this down, gone to sleep, wake up the next day, come back, SheetLink, and I just come and say import from Excel. Oops. I need to I need to actually be in the schedules.

Import from Excel and browse to that Excel file. Say open, And should have my break horse powers. There we go. 50. So so going back and forth between Excel works out pretty well.