The Downside of Using Real Units

Let's say, however, that you you have a you have a fan that is it's got two speeds to it or something like that. And you you would prefer, like, on your Excel schedule, what you're basing what you're basing your your schedules off of, you know, what you've been doing for years is that this says two fifty slash 500 to represent, you know, there's two speeds to it. So the airflow is out of two fifty or 500. So let's go to two fifty slash 500, and Revit's gonna give us it's gonna say, what is that garbage? Because Revit needs this to be a correctly formatted number. This isn't a string. It's not a text field. It's the actual number. Right? You can't do math at 200 slash 500 and saying, like, no.

You you need to fix that. It's only gonna take some kind of properly formatted number. And, also, I can't I can't just delete it and have it be blank. It it it can't be nothing, so it has to be at least zero. It can't be a dash. It can't be it can't be n slash a. So those are all things that are not options. If you do what I just did, which is which is choose for all these parameters to have their real real units, which is a bummer. It it would be really nice if you could. And you change this back to something that's not nothing.

So this is kind of a big deal. This is something worth understanding is that most firms are not gonna be happy with schedules that have to be very specific thing. It works for, like, 80 to 90% of the cells, so so that would be fine. But for the rest of them, you you have to bend over backwards and do some things that you didn't necessarily want to do just to make it work. So like I said, I created a whole system for the firm that I worked for back in 2011 through 2015 or so would have been when I was developing it.

And we used it on a bunch of projects, and it was all it was all like this. It was all, like, real units because, again, we had BIM requirements we had BIM requirements, and I interpreted that as they needed to be real engineering data. Okay? And so the positives was that you could actually do math with this. Like, if I had a whole bunch of exhaust fans, I could sum it up, and I and it would be able to tell me, ah, this is a thousand CFM.

Right? You know, if we've if we've got, you know, 20 of these units or whatever, You'd be able to sum up the weight. The downside is that our schedules look like garbage, particularly the early ones when you haven't filled out a bunch of information yet because, you know, the it would all just be zeros. And we had a note that said if the value is zero, then it means it doesn't mean zero. It means we haven't, like, done it yet. It looked bad. And and, like, the best you can do is either have a note that says if it's zero, it means nothing. And then we had we had temperature we had temperature fields that were, like, negative. It was, like, absolute zero. So it'd say, like, negative 464 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever.

And the the very best you can do is use a conditional format that says if value is zero, black out the cell. So it looked like a, you know, like a hockey player had been, like, through a pretty rough match, like missing teeth and stuff in this guy. It looked it looked bad. So what we do now and what I recommend in Rev X's stuff is is pretty much built is to use text type for everything. Okay? So I'm gonna go go through and show that.