Creating an EF Schedule From Scratch

Alright. So this video is all about teaching how the shared parameter and equipment schedule system works, and how we've got it set up for Rev X. So for Rev X, we've got a whole huge list of shared parameters that we use for equipment schedules, either we also use them for tags. And so in this family, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start with just a box that has no parameters in it, and I'm going to load up shared parameters into it, and I'm going to create from scratch this exhaust fan schedule. If you follow along and if you can do this, then you will have a really good grasp on the basics of the equipment scheduling system that we use in Revit for Rev X.

Equipment scheduling, shared parameters, instance versus type, there's a whole lot to it. So this is going to be a completely exhaustive video. We're going to have more videos on some of the niche topics, but this is going to be a really great first place to start in being able to understand and work with the quote unquote smart equipment schedules. Alright. Let's get going.

And I think that the best way to learn is to actually build from scratch a simple family with shared parameters and a schedule. Now of course in the Rev X infrastructure most of the family, we've got lots of schedules already built, all the families they're preloaded with shared parameters. So generally speaking, you shouldn't have to do this. Even if you do come up with a new bit of equipment that you are trying to create on your own, you're probably just going to copy and modify an existing schedule, an existing family. But going through this exercise is going to be really useful for you to learn how the whole system works, so that you should be able to do that modification a lot easier and with a lot more knowledge than if you were just winging it.

So for this exercise, I'm going to start with a box family that has no shared parameters in it. And I'm going to pretend like I'm making a new exhaust fan. So the box is gonna represent like a roof up last exhaust fan style. And this is just a mock up of the kind of schedule that I'm trying to create here. So that is our destination.

And so I've got a project here based off of the Rev X template, and here I have just a simple box. It has no shared parameters loaded into it. So the first thing I'm gonna do is just drop this family into my project. Gonna drop it right here. And so the first thing I'm gonna try to do is tag this fan. So TG, I'm gonna click. You can see I've got a little question mark here. And normally, I would be able to edit the tag to say, this is EF one. Well, this isn't letting me do that. I'm clicking in, it's not letting me edit it.

Why is that? Well, if we go edit family and I've got the tag selected, edit family, and zoom in here on the mark, and edit on label. We can see that it's looking for the parameter s com equipment ID. And of course that family, that simple box family doesn't have this parameter, so there's nothing for this tag to read. That's why it's given that question mark.

I can close that tag. And so what I need to do is I need to add that shared parameter into this exhaust fan family. I'm gonna show how to do it manually first, so you know what's going on under the hood. But and you should do that for this first parameter. But just so you know, where we're going is we're gonna use d roots to do all of our shared parameter manipulation.

It's way more efficient. But you will appreciate it more once you've done the manual way and it's good to know how to do it manually just in case you ever find yourself on a computer without the roots. Okay. So I'm going to select my new exhaust fan family, say edit family, and I go to family types. And I'm gonna say new parameter, choose shared parameter and select.

And my version of Revit already knows where the shared parameter text file is. If this is your first time, it will ask so that the dialogue will look similar to this. So you just need to browse to that text file and then it will bring you into this dialogue and you're good to go. So I need to find my SCOM equip ID shared parameter. There it is. So I hit okay and I definitely want that to be instance and I want it to be organized under other and hit okay. So there it is, and I hit okay. And then I'm going to load into project and close. I almost always choose load in a project and close. I don't want it sitting up here.

I I almost never save changes that would save the family on the computer and you don't need to do that. And I almost always overwrite the existing version unless I've done a lot of editing of the parameter values. Okay. And now I can select this tag and it will let me edit the tag to be EF one. And if I select the family down here, can see it says SCOM equipment ID.

That's the parameter that I just added. Here it is, e f one. I can also change it here, e f two, and it updates the tag because that is the parameter that the tag is reading. And by the way, these are these are shared parameters that have been applied as project parameters to category mechanical equipment. Don't have to worry about that now. You can just ignore it. We will talk about that later. Okay. So I've got my family. I've learned how to add shared parameters, the manual way to a mechanical equipment.

Let's start with the schedule. Let's build let's get this schedule going. So I'm gonna right click the schedule category, say new schedule. And I need to tell the schedule to look at category mechanical equipment. And I can choose the name, it's going to be cost and schedule.

And I say, just do a search for SCOM and I can find equip ID. And now there's there's gonna be a list of other shared parameters in here that it's already just kind of got preloaded in because other families in this project have these. We're gonna ignore these for right now. We're gonna do this kind of methodically. But if you were doing this on the fly and you noticed some parameters here that you wanted in your schedule, you could go ahead and load them.

But we're gonna take this one at a time. We're gonna be a little bit more deliberate so that we don't get confused. So I've added this scheduled field to my new schedule, and hit okay. And so a couple things are going on. And now that we've created the world's most simple equipment schedule, we've got the title of it up here.

We have the column header, which by default just gives it the parameter name. And then it's this is a list of all of the mechanical equipment that is in this project. So if I go pop open a three d view real quick, I've I've I've dropped some other mechanical equipment in this project. And something that's useful to know, if I select this row in the schedule here for RTU two, I go to a three d view, it's got it selected there. So that's a nice little just trick to find.

Sometimes it's you can lose track of work equipment, so that's one way to find it. If you can find it on a schedule, you can find it in a three d view or or plan view. However, we are trying to build our exhaust fan schedule and we've got a bit of work to do obviously. The first thing I'd like to do is I would like to not see anything in the schedule that isn't an exhaust fan. So I'm gonna show two different ways to do that.

The quick and dirty way, and then I'm gonna show quote unquote the right way. So there's a category here to filter things. So let's say edit for the filter. And we can say filter by our only option is to filter by the one parameter we've got in our schedule. Now I could say parameter begins with e f, and it will just show this.

Now this works, but I don't like it for a variety of reasons. One is, I could also have I could I could imagine that I might also in the future want to have on this schedule fans that are kitchen exhaust fans. I might wanna call those KES. Well, those wouldn't show up. I can also imagine dropping new equipment and wanting it to show up on the on the on this schedule, but it it's just it hasn't been tagged yet, but I would like to tag it here, but it hasn't shown up so it could just be a whole mess.

So this can work, but it's kind of cludgy and it's easy to break. So we're actually gonna do something a little fancier for filtering which equipment shows up. And what we're gonna do is we're going to use a special shared parameter that is dedicated to schedule filtering. And I am now going to add that parameter using d roots. So I'm just going be in this view.

I don't need this family to be selected. I'm going to go to the d roots tab. I'm going to go to pair manager. And I'm gonna go to the families tab. And so what you do is you select the family you want to apply parameters to, and then you will import in the parameter that you're looking for. And I can search families here. So I remember the name of my family is m, I'm gonna call it new fan. Yeah, there we go. That's my family. And then I can do import export.

I'm gonna say import shared parameters. And here's my shared parameter text file. So I'm saying, yes, that is the shared parameter file that I wanna pull from. And I already know what the name of this what the name of the parameter is that I'm looking for. I'm gonna do a quick search for it.

That's SCOM dead filter, and I'm gonna import that. And then I've got some decisions to make. Do I want it to be instance or type based? I want this to be type based because all instances of this fan family, I want to show up on the exhaust fan schedule. And then I want it to be grouped under other and that is all that I'm going to do here.

So I'm gonna hit apply. It's telling me that it's done the job. I'm gonna close it. And if I select my fan and I come to edit type, I can see here it is, SCOM filter. Perfect. So now that I'm here, I'm actually I'm just gonna type in EF because that's how I wanna filter this. I'm gonna say okay. And I'm gonna come to my fan schedule and I'm gonna go to fields. I'm going to probably see where I'm going here. Going to find the schedule filter parameter, move to the top.

I'm gonna go to the filter rules and set change my filter to filter by schedule filter equals e f. And now I've got a more robust method for scheduling my equipment that does not rely on the naming convention for the tag parameter. So that's all well and good, you might be saying, but I don't wanna see this on my schedule and if I remove it then the filter won't work. You can simply hide it. Come up here to the ribbon, hit hide.

Okay. So all of the Rev X schedules, they have that column in there that's hidden by default for the schedule filter. So if you're if you're having troubles getting a piece of equipment to show up or not show up on a schedule, just go check out the what the filter rules are for the schedule filter. Okay. So we've got our we've got our schedule.

It is filtering correctly, so I'm not seeing equipment that I don't wanna see. And now I want to start building out the rest of this stuff. Now since I since I made all these parameters myself, I know which parameters I'm looking for. You might have to go reference if you were to do this and you didn't know, you would have to go find another schedule and see what parameters was used to build there. That's not really the point of this exercise.

You will start to understand how I've named all of the shared parameters, so you'll be able to do this eventually once you start looking at it. But knowing off the top of your head what the scheduled parameter names are isn't going to be strictly necessary. So I'm going to go back to my here, why don't I do this? Why don't I make it so that you can see what's going on there? Okay.

So got my so I'm gonna go to Diaries again. I'm going to go into the ParaManager. And I'm gonna go to families, gonna search for new exhaust fan. And I'm going to import share parameters and select my shared parameter file. And now I'm going to hunt and find all of the shared parameters I want moving from left to right.

So SCOM NFR, That I want in the l. I want service. Service. And I want sometimes I use service and sometimes I also use location. So I'm gonna pull that in as well. And I want unit type. Oops. As comm unit type, not vr v unit type. And I want Okay. And so now I'm getting into the parameters for the fan.

And I'm gonna show you kind of how I've built this. So s fan, you can see I've got fan SA, fan EA, fan OA. I've got some RA in here I believe. Yep. And so this is an exhaust fan, right? So I'm gonna filter this. I keep searching for S fan EA. So now I'm seeing all of the exhaust fan parameters that I've got built here so that I can start selecting them. So drive, that's there. CFM, I'll probably call it airflow.

Or is it? Call it out from oh, there it is. Airflow TSP RPM motor horsepower. Okay. And that is that for the fan and motor section. We're getting on to electrical now. So now I'm going s e and then there's a little naming idiosyncrasy here. But the ones with text are the ones you want. So I want MCA, I want MLCP. I want folks and I want face text.

This schedule isn't calling for watts or anything like that. Probably because horsepower is there and that's just how that is. So that's fine. I'm gonna leave it like that. And then I'm looking for wait. So SCOM wait. Where are we? Wait. And then I actually forgot to add on the schedule here, but I also want the notes, so SCOM notes. That'll be there too.

So I'm going to import all of those and then I've got another choice here. I want it's asking me if I want these to be instance or type based. Now this is this is a bit of a judgment call. This is worth a whole video just on the pros and cons and when it's a good idea to be instance and when it's a good idea to be type. I will leave that alone and I will just show you what I would do in this instance.

So manufacturer is gonna be type, the model is gonna be type. There's an argument that a lot of these others should be type as well, but then there's an argument that it gets confusing when some are type and some are instance for the users. So just pick one and go with it. So I'm also going to choose weight to be type because it's if the models if the manufacturer model is the same, then the weight's gonna be the same. For the for the rest of it, I'm gonna let that all be instance based.

And like these to show up on group under other, might not actually do that but we will find out. Alright. Hit apply and you can see this is a massive time saver. I just pushed all these shared parameters into my family. And if I select it, you can see that there's a lot more. See all those parameters are are now there, and there's a few more type parameters as well, weight, model, manufacturer, etcetera. Okay. So now we've got our family loaded up with parameters. Let's get our exhaust fan schedule. The schedule loaded up with the parameters.

So I'm just gonna almost do a similar thing to what I just did. Gonna do search for the parameters that I want. So I want manufacturer model service. Again, also service location. I might want one or the other or both. I'm just gonna throw them in. For now, I'll make my mind up later. Unit type drive. So now we're onto the fan stuff. So fan e a drive, airflow, TSP, RPM, and motor horsepower.

And then we're on the electric stuff. So I do want volts. Base text. MCA, and an ICP text. Wait. That's calm. Wait. And then notes. Com notes. Okay. Alright. We don't need that anymore. Can we expand that? Okay. So we've got our we've got our exhaust fan schedule.

Looks pretty bad. I'm going to pop it onto a sheet so we can see what it looks like. Sheets. I'm gonna go to my roof plan, and I'm gonna drop a sheet, glass fan schedule, onto the sheet so we can see what it looks like. Quite bad. Another thing I gotta do real quick is I'm going to organize this. Mechanic yeah. Here we go. We're just gonna set that to mechanical. That goes where it goes.

Alright. So oh, boy. We got we got some work to do. Right? Now again, normally you wouldn't have to do this because you would just be duplicating already pre made schedule, which is already looks good.

But this is a pedagogical exercise so that you know how to edit things and you never get tripped up in the future. Okay. So I'm gonna go back in exhaust fan schedule, and one of the first things I'm gonna do is I'm gonna update the appearance. So I'm gonna go here in appearance, and we can see what's happening is that the the font types is all this big stuff which we don't want. So we're gonna change that to note thirty second, header text, we were using title small one eight, Blank row before data, don't even know why that's a default because it looks dumb.

And I'd like to give it an outline. Let's see. That did okay. So that helped. We're we're in the right ballpark now of of how we want things to look. And I'm gonna give I'm gonna I'm gonna do that. Well, yeah. So let me let me just. Woah. What did I do? I clicked the wrong thing. I'm just gonna go manufacture. I'm gonna type in and yes. And the model is I forget what I said. SLS 42.

SLS dash 42. K. And I don't wanna look back here. And so you can see, like, the justification is not right, right? I want it to be centered.

So I can select all of the columns and say align center. I want everything to be and that isn't working because what I had to do is I had to select not these headers and to select these headers up here. Also you can go into formatting and you have more controls over here over formatting. So you can also just select everything in here and say alignment center. And I like my notes to be alignment left, so I make that change.

So that's also a widespread change you can make. Okay. And now we want to change the header titles because obviously this is garbage, nobody wants to read that. And you just come in here and you type in what you want and you can tab from one to the next. So I just hit tab after I typed in Mark. It doesn't look like it. It's not obvious. I don't know why, but it's not. But I'm actually in the active cell of column b for the header. So now I can type that.

I'm gonna hit tab. Now I'm in column c, MDL, service location, unit type, drive. We're gonna go CFM. We're gonna go TSP, which is one of column, RPM, motor horsepower. Where we at? Volt, dead, phase, MCA, and SCP, weight, and notes. Okay. That looks pretty good. And this is how we're looking. Already looking a lot better.

Another thing I'd like to do is I'd like to group some of this some of these together. So for all the electrical stuff, I'd like to group that. So I'm gonna click and drag. So I've got I have voltage phase MCA and MSO, MSCP selected here. And I come up and say group, and it gives me something here.

I can just type in whatever I want. Electrical, this could be fan. However you like. Alright. And then we can come here on the sheet and change, adjust the column width so that it's a little less insane. Tidy how we like it. RPM. Make sure we don't have weird wrapping issues. You could do it, you know, maybe maybe like that. I'll just leave it.

Goodness. I don't like I don't like any of that. There we go. We'll just leave it like that. Voltage phase, MCA, MOCP. Wait. Notes maybe wants to be a little bigger. Alright. So now we've got our schedule. It's looking much better. And now we would like to let me show what would happen if we were to create another couple of these. So let's say I've got another one over here. And you can see that automatically populated the schedule with this other instance. And now I've got three. Alright.

And then I I can tag them. I can update the tag. K. It's gonna be three. And so now you will notice that we've got there it's an EF231. It's not putting these in any particular order, which is weird. But we would like it to sort by, you know, the by the mark. So if I go back into the exhaust fan, I can say sorting grouping. A lot of power in this tab here. Sorting grouping, you can do some pretty cool stuff.

I won't get all into all the details because we'd be spending a long time here. But just for this, we can sort by equipment ID and it will sort it, you know, 123. We could just sort it in descending if we wanted. Alright. So that's looking better. Now we get to the fun part of data entry. So now there's I'm gonna show three different ways to fill out this schedule. Way number one is pretty obvious. You can just type in here, and this goes on the roof. Oh, no. No. I'm sorry. Location is roof. Kind of obvious for a roof fan, isn't it? Roof.

The service is, know, this might be I don't know. Bathroom 123. This might be goodness. Kitchen kitchen main, and this might be kitchen primary. You could see some weird things happening in there, kind of that wasn't totally because I'm on Butterfinger.

Some of that is because Revit is a little goofy with data entry, which is relevant to the conversation here. Because if you've got a lot of stuff like this isn't that big of a schedule, obviously some schedules are gonna be bigger. You might have a lot of exhaust fans, and you don't want to be messing around with that entry in this. It's just not very efficient. So we have options with Derutz.

Other plug ins have similar tools, but Derutz is the one that we that we have standardized on and it's pretty good. So go to the roots, go to sheet link, come to the schedules tab, and search for my exhaust fan schedule. Here it is. And now I can export it to Excel. I can also use the a little editor thing that it has in here, is less annoying than native Revit.

So for so, you know, if I this is just easier to type in. Trust me. It's like a little mini Excel thing. So this can be an easy place to do some editing. So let's see. Unit type, we're gonna we're gonna say, what is that thing? It's my example. Yeah. Roof up blast. Roof up blast. And then so I could do that thing where you just drag it and it copies. Right? You can't do that in Revit, but you can do it right here because that's an Excel kind of thing. And then so that was an easy thing to make. Update model and boom, there it goes. Drive. Yep. Thanks. I think you're here. I can say this is direct.

Boom. Update model. So this is handy if you're just doing some real quick ones. The other thing I can do is I can come back over to schedules tab. I can export it to Excel. Save. Alright. Existing work sheets. And now I'm in Excel and I can do data manipulation. Now don't, you can't mess around too much with the columns, like don't mess with these, just edit the cells.

That's fine. Don't mat like don't add extra columns that will totally confuse Revit. So don't don't worry about that. And it it loses the formatting. Not a big deal. It's just about the data. Okay. So here, you know, I could this is really handy for when you've already got the data in Excel anyways, and you can just copy and paste it in here. If you need to do any calculations, can do that in here. You could also take this you could export your schedule from Revit, you could email it to a rep, have them fill it out, and then push it right back into Revit after you QC it.

So that's quite nice. But a few things here, let me just do that phase. Boom. I don't even know what values make sense. I'm just gonna type in some stuff. Yeah. Motor horsepower. Five. Oh, that looks easy there. Made some mistakes. Stakes were made. Not by me. Right. CFM is gonna be a thousand. This is gonna be 980.

This is gonna be 100, and TSP is gonna be four zero point three. Okay. So we've oh, and let's see. It's all the same family, so this should be the same. So I'm say $90.90 90, and the notes, we'll get into this in a second. I'm just gonna say note one for now. We'll we'll address that in a second. Okay. So I've made some edits to the data of my schedule, hit save, and I can close that. And then back here in D roots, I just import and it's that one.

Model updated successfully. And you can see it's got all the information there. Let's go check it out on the roof plan, make sure everything looks good. So this because this I'm pointing at the screen. Dude, because roof up last wrap, it made the cell height bigger. And if I don't like that, I can just go like that to make it stack nicely. Everything else here looks pretty good in terms of how that looks. Okay. So I'm happy with that. And finally, let's address let's talk about notes.

I'm saying note one here, but I don't have any notes anywhere. So there's a couple different ways you can do it. You can opt could just do, you know, text one, note one, etcetera. That's viable. Here's the problem with that. Most people like to have their notes under the schedule. Looks good. It's what we've been doing for years and years. Cool. Till see what happened?

You added more fans and all of a sudden your notes, your schedule ran over your notes because there's no, you know, relational association between these. Well, So to so so that's that's a downfall with that method. It's simple, but you gotta make you gotta review your sheets and make sure you're not running over your notes every single time. And they don't live with the schedule, so they could become separated. So we don't really like that.

So one method that you can employ, and of course this is this is a judgment call on you as the prepare of your documents, but what we have built into our families is we put the notes up here up here in the schedule at the top. So the way we do it is I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna click in the title and I'm gonna say insert, this is insert row. So I'm gonna insert below selected and just created another row here. And I'm actually gonna insert one more, below selected. And then I can say, I'm actually gonna make this a little bigger.

And so I'm gonna say notes. You have to do shift enter to get a line break and then one, note one, shift enter two, note two, etcetera. And obviously, that's the wrong font. So come up here to font, change that to thirty seconds. And don't want it to be bold. K. And I want it to be over on the left at the top. K. So there's my notes. And let's let's take a look at what this looks like.

It's got these lines in here. We don't want this line. And for for reason, just trust me on this one, you want this bottom row for for reasons that are boring, but just add it. It'll be an Easter egg, you'll find out. But I don't want this line here. So I'm going to select both of those, go to the borders, and I say none. I say okay. And then I'm going to say borders, just the outside. Say okay. And then I'm gonna change the row height here. Where are we at? Resize. Just change that to point one six. There we go. Okay.

So now and then now we have our notes. And they they will not be run over. They are stuck with the schedule. They will not get lost. And so that is how that's our recommended way of doing notes. It gets a little you have to get used to it, but we think it's the best way. If you really insist on doing it the floating text box way, be my guest. Just know what you're getting into. Gosh. Okay.

That's this video of so we we made this exhaust fan. We started with the dumb box. We added shared parameters to the dumb box, and then we created a family, a schedule from scratch, and we added the shared parameters to it. We cleaned it up. We made it look nice, and now we've got ourselves our very own exhaust fan schedule that we built from scratch.

So if you can do that, if you can follow through that and understand what's going on there, then you are pretty much good to go on, you know, the whole equipment scheduling system. There's more to talk about. There are we're gonna have more videos going into different aspects of schedules, but this is a overview to get you in the game, so to speak. And I trust that you can now figure out lots of problems yourselves. If you have specific problems, of course, we've got other videos for that. And as always, hit me up if you've got a novel one. I love working on novel Reverb problems. Alright. Thanks.