Introduction

So today's session is all about equipment schedules and shared parameters. So and the reason we need to know about shared parameters is because if we want our equipment schedules in Revit and associated with our families, we need to use shared parameters. And so the first question that we should cover is, why on earth would you want to let Revit do that for you? You know, for years, we've been doing our equipment schedules in Excel, and that has been working just fine. Why would we wanna do that?

What are the pros and cons? Well, first, let's go over what our landscape of options are. So so we could use lines and text for equipment schedules that has the benefit of being difficult to break and very simple, but pretty slow in tees. We can keep our equipments most most firms, you've already got your equipment schedules in Excel, and you've been using a plug in or something like that to link it into CAD. So you can either take that CAD file that's got your schedules and then link that CAD file into Revit.

So Excel CAD Revit, or there's plug ins where you can link your Excel into Revit. And so it's an object in Revit. It's either a legend or a schedule, but not a smart schedule. So it comes in, but it's still got that link to Excel. Excel is the source of truth of information, and there's no actual link between that information and any of the families, any of the objects in your project.

So the problem with having the source of truth in Excel is that it's a link, you have to remember to update the link. Plenty of drawing sets have gone out where the drawing the schedules that were on the drawings that went out were the version before someone updated the Excel, and it didn't get in before the printing, and it's confusing. And maybe there was a different version because there was a copy of the Excel file, and it just got all sort of all over the place. And then if it's if the source of truth is in Excel, you could have a situation where in your project, you're showing 10 exhaust fans on the roof, and your Excel has eight or 12. That's probably not gonna happen if you're doing live smart schedules because these schedules populate themselves with the families that are actually in the project.

So you've got that tight feedback loop between your schedules and what you're showing on the plans. Okay. So what's the downside of using native Revit schedules with shared parameters and everything? Well, it honestly, it's a big learning curve. It's a new way of thinking about things for most people.

And this is basically a database with a couple of different front ends for the information that's in the database, some some three d elements that are associated with the information and schedules that are associated with the information. It's a new way of thinking about our documents and our drawings. It is easy to do wrong, and it is difficult to fix because of some of the ways that shared parameters work. Once you've made a shared parameter, there's not really a control z to it. If you made it in a in a certain wrong way or a way that you didn't like, it's difficult to delete.

If it's in your families and various projects, it can be really difficult to to sort of go through and fix that. So this is definitely a sort of thing that as you're getting into it, you wanna move slowly and very thoughtfully. And I'm I'm saying this as someone who's now built two complete from scratch shared parameters, equipment, schedule systems. I've made most of the mistakes that you can make, and so be be careful and thoughtful as you're going through this. Another reason you might not wanna do it is because making a new column for your schedules is not as easy as right click insert column to left.

You've got to make a new shared parameter. You've got to insert it. You've got to get it into the schedule and the family and the shared parameters text file. This is the whole thing. If you don't understand what's going on, if you don't understand the difference between instance and type parameters or you just get a little confused about it, you can find yourself saying, hey. Where's my data? And it's probably there somewhere, but it can be really frustrating on deadline day. So the point of that is that this is not this is not like, oh, I'm gonna take a ninety minute seminar, and all of a sudden, I understand everything there to know about shared parameters. This is kind of like a introduction and a warning that the the the learning curve can be somewhat significant. And so I really recommend that you take it seriously and don't wait until deadline day just to try to figure this stuff out.

So I just I just sort of said listed a whole bunch of bad things with with schedules, and it's kind of difficult and all this other stuff. So why would you make the decision to go with this for your practice? Well, you don't have to worry about broken or forgotten links. It's all within the project file. You don't have to worry about a schedule with a different number of units than what's on the drawings.

If there's 10 exhaust fans on your roof, there's gonna be 10 exhaust fans on your schedule. And then, you know, if you if you are working with a mature system where everything's set up, it's it's very easy to get your projects going. It can be very fast. You can just copy and paste in your families, which you gotta do anyways to get on the plans, and you just copy and paste over the schedules, and they're good to go. And if equipment is such that you've already you know, it's a maybe it's off the shelf type of stuff that you've already got the information prepopulated.

So if you look in here, you know, we don't really have we don't you know, this is split system stuff. Right? We don't have all the information filled out because we don't wanna do we don't wanna give anyone stuff with the engineering data filled out. That's just liability, and this is not what we're doing. But on your end of things, if if every for all these units, you have a standard thing that you use and a standard spec for that, you can pre populate that in your in your library, so to speak.

And every time you drop it in, it's just ready to go. So it can be really fast. The final reason that you might do this is because it might be a requirement. So the reason I built my first shared parameters equipment schedule system back in, I wanna say, 2011, 2012, is because we had a project where it was literally a requirement of the project that we delivered our models. Our models are contract deliverables as well as the fact that our families had to have all of the shared parameters and data embedded in the objects themselves. We were contractually on the hook for that. That's still not common, I think, in most industries. This was a big tech client, but it is not science fiction that that can be on the hook for that. Yeah. Okay.

So enough to chat. Let's actually get into and show how some of this stuff works. So big picture, how mature system works. Then we're gonna go to scratch. We're gonna build a system from scratch so you can get the fundamental skills and under understand what's really going on. And then we'll we'll go to another level of skills from there.