Revit Efficiency: We All Want It—Come and Get It!

CINDY WOOD: All right. Good morning, everybody.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

CINDY WOOD: Night after-- or night. See?

[LAUGHTER]

Apparently, I was at the party too late last night as well. So thank you, guys, all for coming bright and early the morning after. Hopefully, we'll keep you guys engaged enough not to fall asleep. But if you do fall asleep, I won't judge. Welcome to Revit efficiency. We all want it. Come and get it.

VICKIE PATEL: Go to the next.

CINDY WOOD: All right, a little bit about us, I just gave myself away with my about. Normally, I blend in with the Americans. But I grew up in Canada. 12 years ago I graduated from Dalhousie University in Halifax. So my abouts come out a little bit. So I've been working in the architecture industry for 12 years. And I moved over to the BIM side about three years ago.

VICKIE PATEL: And I'm Vickie Patel. I also have 12 years of architectural practice background. I grew up here in the US, raised in Texas, hence the boots. And I also switched over to BIM management about three years ago. So yeah.

CINDY WOOD: And we both work for--

BOTH: --HKS.

CINDY WOOD: --Architects. Yeah. All right, so just a little bit of quote to start us off today. We all lost a big legend this week, Stan Lee. So "everybody learns differently. And everybody gets to a certain point from a different direction." So we all have different paths in life.

And we get a little used to how we work in Revit. And sometimes, you don't realize some things that are right in front of you. So we're going to share a little bit of those things today. Learning objectives-- number 1, there's many ways to complete tasks in Revit. Sometimes, there's ways that are faster than the ones that you're used to, just like I said.

Objective 2-- visibility graphics is the thing that we struggle with every day when you work in Revit. So we're just going to show you a couple ways to get around some things. And so many buttons-- there's what? How many ribbons in Revit? And you don't necessarily go through all of them every day to find that button. There's always new ones that are added. So we're going to show you some buttons that people don't normally use.

And ways to cheat your views-- and when I say ways to cheat your views, I don't mean with detail lines and stuff like that because if you work in my office and you do stuff like that, I might come after you a little bit. Improving efficiency-- so we're going to have a little-- we're going to show you slides. But we're also going to do a live demo in Revit of all the things that we're telling you about.

Working schedules-- there's a lot of things that you can hide in schedules. So it's always good to have one working schedule that you do all your mess in. And then you also have your nice, pretty schedule that you put on a sheet.

VICKIE PATEL: So you'll see over here in our project browser, we've got two schedules here. So this index of drawings here is the nice schedule that ends up going on our sheet. But there's some sorting and et cetera that we have to do. And, of course, you don't want that to be on the sheet.

So we have this working schedule here, where we can put in the discipline code, all the stuff that we use to sort our schedule or our index of drawings here. So you'll see that these two don't have information here. I can put that in, obviously.

But how is this done? So it's pretty straightforward. You go to the one that is going to go on to the sheet. And under here, under formatting, whenever you select the different fields, you have this option here called Hidden Field. So if I uncheck that here, you'll see that that field shows back up here.

So again, the data is all the same. It's all pretty similar. It's just in this one, the field has been hidden. So if I come back here, click the Hidden, now, it's turned off. So the working schedules are pretty good. It's the ones-- this is just the one where you update the information.

The other one stays on the sheet. That way your graphics on the sheet don't get messed up because sometimes people turn that on by accident. And now, they print the sheet. And your schedules are all incorrect.

CINDY WOOD: It's all about saving us on print day because that day you go to do the prints, that's when everything is going to mess up the most. Visibility and graphics in schedules-- now, this is one that I feel like I worked in Revit for years, and I didn't even realize that it was a thing.

You can include or not include your links in your schedule. And when you do include your links, this little guy up here shows up-- visibility graphic overrides. Now, if you don't have your links loaded, or you don't have them included in your schedule, that button is not even going to show up.

VICKIE PATEL: So you'll see here, we don't have that checked. So therefore, over here in the Properties that option is not showing up. If I click on that--

CINDY WOOD: I might not even have-- there it is.

VICKIE PATEL: Yep. So as soon as I clicked on that, now, you can go into the Visibility Graphics and control elements that you don't want to show or show through. So we don't have the link completely loaded in. So therefore, it's not letting us control it. But now you can go through and filter through your linked file of what you want in the schedule.

CINDY WOOD: And it's not something that you're going to use all the time. But if you're working on a really large project, and you have doors that are coming in from every single model, and it's not something that you're going to want to see in your door schedule-- there's only so many things you can filter in your door schedule. It gets to be quite cumbersome. You can turn it off just in select models.

VICKIE PATEL: And if you guys have any questions as we're going through this, just feel free to raise your hand. I mean--

CINDY WOOD: Key schedules-- Now, in our company, we've started to do a Revit assessment. Try to figure out where everybody is so that we can do proper training for the needs of our company. And key schedules-- I can almost say 100% of people got key schedules wrong. And it's mostly because people just don't know what a key schedule is.

Maybe, they're using it. They just don't know that it's called a key schedule. So key schedule is a way to quickly populate your schedules with the information. Now, you can't do it with all the information in your schedules. It doesn't let you do it with--

VICKIE PATEL: Shared parameters.

CINDY WOOD: --shared parameters and type parameters. So it is an instance parameter thing. So we've done it for doors here in this one. And we'll show you how that's done.

VICKIE PATEL: So here, I've got a door schedule. And you can see that there's some information that's still lacking within the door schedule. So I've got a key schedule here, where I can create a key name.

So we can say that this is an office door, so just something to let me know what this door type-- key goes to. And then I can type in what type of frame it is. And I'm just going to fill in a few. And you'll see, as I populate that, and then apply-- so this is not my working. So I'm going to turn on-- I don't think--

CINDY WOOD: Go into--

VICKIE PATEL: Oh, this one. Sorry.

CINDY WOOD: It's OK. No, it's the exact same. So it just shows in the schedule, you do have to have door styles turned on. That's that whole hidden thing, whenever you can't find things.

VICKIE PATEL: I don't--

CINDY WOOD: Did we not even--

VICKIE PATEL: It's not even showing up. There it is. It's right up here.

CINDY WOOD: That is definitely one that's always hidden because it's not one that you want to see. It's your own thing.

VICKIE PATEL: So it's still not letting me apply it.

CINDY WOOD: Turn your links off.

VICKIE PATEL: So it doesn't work when you've got the little checkbox for linked files to come through because, obviously, you can't apply a door style to a linked model. But you'll see, as I populate that door style, whatever information I had in those fields is being populated here. And if I go back, and I change this to-- and have a typo in there too-- it's now changed these two.

They're linked. So this way, you can control a bunch of doors at one time. So again, it works really well for doors, works really well for room finishes. So if that one material changes, you just change it in that 1 key, and it's updated everywhere.

The sucky part is that it doesn't work with shared parameters. So if it's anything that you've got to tag on a plan or an elevation, then it won't work that way. So you just have to keep that in mind.

CINDY WOOD: I used to find that the most cumbersome one for doors to put in was the head sill jamb ones. And those ones take a while to populate. So those ones you can put in. And it'll populate really fast for you, if you have a bunch of doors that have the same detail that go along with it.

Group headings schedule columns-- so this is just a way to have a little bit of a heading over top. The group parameter is not going to show up until you highlight the columns. And then you can group them together.

VICKIE PATEL: So as soon as I select these, I can now group them. And now, I can come in here in this cell and type in. And you can do that at many levels. So if you wanted to group all of that now, and have a header above it, you can put in information there too.

CINDY WOOD: Combining schedule parameters-- this is another one too that you're not going to know you need it until you need it. And so here, I use the example of having-- if you have a programmed area that your client gives you, and then you have the actual area, you just never know, sometimes, that your client's going to be like, I want to see them in the same column. And you're like, cool. So now, I've got to export it to Excel. And then I've got to figure out how to do that. But you can do it right in Revit.

VICKIE PATEL: So we're going put the [INAUDIBLE].

CINDY WOOD: [INAUDIBLE]. So you can tell which parameters that you want to go together. You can say what you want that column to be named. And then you can also tell it what you want as a break, whether it's a slash, a dash. You can put a suffix, a prefix.

And now, you have them combined on the same one. So you could get rid of the other columns, or anything like that, keep them there, whatever. But that's your way to combine them.

Organizing schedules-- now, this is something that came out in 2018.1. And I don't know about you guys, but when I get a big project, you get area plans that take up this much space. Every time you open it up, you're like, OK, cool, where am I again? Where am I again? OK, right. So now, with the organizing of the schedules, it will put them under little boxes that expand.

VICKIE PATEL: Yeah, just like how your views organize within Revit. No.

CINDY WOOD: Yeah, right click on schedules. Yeah. So you do-- it doesn't come with preorganized ones. So you do have to make the rules for it. But now, you can keep your-- you can organize them in different ways. So you can organize them by name, anything like that.

But I tend to want to keep the area stuff together, the door stuff together. It just makes it for a little bit more of a clean browser. So yeah, if you are working in older versions of Revit, obviously, it's not going to work.

All right, let's get a little bit into your visibility graphic stuff here-- now, scope boxes. This is a way, if you're working on a larger building, and you need all your stuff to crop the exact same way, or if you have a floor plan, then you have an electrical plan, and you have a RCP, those type of things, you can make them all crop the exact same rather than guessing every single time.

VICKIE PATEL: So I've got this level one view here. So if I come in here, scope boxes are actually under the View category. And you've got the Scope Box option here. Whenever you create it, you can give it a name, so this way, if you want to make sure you've got it correlated with whatever zone or quadrant you're in.

So I can-- if I could type this morning-- there an height option. So the scope box is a three-dimensional element. So if you wanted the same type of cropping to happen in 3D, you could set that height, so that it would always crop in 3D at that same spot too. Once you've got those properties set, you simply just draw it.

It is rectangular. So you cannot do an irregular shape. You can rotate it. So that's a little bit more advanced. But you can rotate it. But again, it's just a rectangular shape. So I've created this one for this view. And you do see them in all of the other views.

But now, if I go to this view, and go to the Properties, you've got this option here that says Scope Box. So I can change that to Zone 1. And you'll see that it's cropped it. And same thing with these two-- I can just select the two of them, and change that to that Zone 1. And over here, you'll see that they're all cropped the same.

One of the nuances is once a view has a scope box applied to it, you'll see that the crop box is locked. So if you want to adjust that crop box, you have to be in a view that does not have the scope box applied. And now I can see the-- and I'm going to turn off the-- so now, I can see the scope box here. And now, I can adjust it.

So that is a little bit of a nuance that you have to have a view where all the scope boxes are visible so that you can adjust those. And as I adjusted that, you'll see here that all these other views updated automatically.

CINDY WOOD: It does tend to be a question we get, actually, quite often of I can't fix my view. I can't change my crop. And normally, it's because there's this a scope box on there. Color schedules-- when you do your color floor plan areas, and then you pull your color palette on there, it'll bring all of your colors that you have loaded in your project for that area type. But if you go into the type properties of the schedule, you can make it show just what you have in that view.

VICKIE PATEL: Yep. So wherever you select the actual legend element over here, if you go to Edit Type, you have this option. So right now, it says All. So that's why we've got all of these listed here. As soon as I change that to By View, you'll see that it shrinks.

And it's only showing you the colors that are applicable to this view. And that, obviously, is smart. So if I changed one of these and changed the-- that updates over there. So if you add more areas, it'll populate and just grow.

CINDY WOOD: And it is a view specific thing. So every view that you have it on is going to look different, depending on what areas or colors you have in there. Two patterns on one surface-- now, this is new in 2019. It's something that, I know, when I worked on projects, I wished it would do all the time.

You have a client in, and they want to have, say, colored elevations, right? But then you have panels on your walls. So you're like, OK, cool, that's great. Now, I've got to put a color on my wall. And I've got to either put in some detail lines, which, of course, I don't want you guys to do. Or you can make a family that's parametric [INAUDIBLE] lines. And you do all these little tricks that we had to get around it before.

Now, it'll let you do two patterns in one. The only kicker with it is the background pattern is drafting pattern only. So you can't have two model patterns on top of each other. So that'll work if you want a wood grain in the background, and then some lines on top, or a solid fill pattern.

VICKIE PATEL: So we're going to demo it here with just a filled region, instead of actually doing a material. So we've got a filled region here created. And if you go to the Edit Type, you'll now see that there's a foreground and a background option.

So just to make sure you guys understand the whole-- what it does with the drafting in the background, so the foreground can be drafting or model. You get both of those options here. So I'm going to pick that one. And then when I go to the background here, you'll see that the model option is grayed out.

So I'm just going to do a diagonal here, hit OK, Apply. So now, you'll see that. But again, because it's a drafting pattern, if I change the scale here, you'll see the scale of that drafting pattern change too. So if I go back and do this as a solid--

CINDY WOOD: Do you want a different color maybe?

VICKIE PATEL: Yeah. We'll do pink. So now, you can see. So now, if you've got to show that solid color of your metal panel, but you still want to show the seams of them, you can do that now.

CINDY WOOD: So this will show a little differently when you are in your materials browser. But same thing, it'll ask you for a foreground and a background pattern now.

VICKIE PATEL: So you've got foreground and background. Same thing with the cut patterns too-- you can do a foreground and a background there too.

CINDY WOOD: This is another good one-- having to filter conditions. Most times when I help people with filters, the way they mess up the most is they would use the AND parameter as an OR parameter. So say you want to show your hatchings in your walls, or something like that. And you're like, I need to show one hour, but I also need to show two hour.

So a lot of people would use that AND in your filters. But how Revit would see it is, if it didn't have both of those, then your filter would not work whatsoever. So now, it lets you do that AND or an OR. They're all the same. So I was just going to filter walls, A3.

VICKIE PATEL: Did you to create a new one? So you can see here that we've got the AND option here. All right.

CINDY WOOD: So I did one as just a regular wall and one as a firewall. And I did the AND. And you'll see, if we apply this to it-- I was just going to put a color to it. Yeah. And then nothing happens because there isn't a wall that has both of those properties in it. I selected two different wall types.

So where you do the AND, Revit is going to look for both of those in the exact same wall. And since we don't have it, the filter didn't work. If we use those same rules, but use the OR parameter, we should-- fingers crossed because nothing ever works as you seem sometimes-- should have a different result.

And you can do both. You can set up your filter so that you have some AND parameters, some OR parameters, all in the same filter. Did it work?

VICKIE PATEL: Yeah. It's just I did the cut pattern color.

CINDY WOOD: Oh, OK.

VICKIE PATEL: So now, you can see that one [INAUDIBLE].

CINDY WOOD: So it'll do the walls that we had that were rated and the walls that we had that weren't rated because it's OR.

VICKIE PATEL: Yeah, there.

CINDY WOOD: Oh, did we go-- OK. All right, let's talk a little bit about some of the buttons that we don't necessarily use. The What's New button-- this is an easy one. But you'd be surprised, most people don't know it's there.

Anytime a new version comes out in Revit, even if it's your update-- 2019.1, 2019.1.2, all of those. If you go into the What's New button, it will actually bring you to an Autodesk page that's going to tell you all of the new features that they put in.

VICKIE PATEL: Oops. Did not mean to open that.

[CHUCKLES]

I got to start a new, right?

CINDY WOOD: There should be-- if you go to the start view-- or no. Yeah, if you do a new one-- duh.

VICKIE PATEL: Well, we'll come back to that one. Yeah, so you only get that when you're on your Project Landing page. So you have to have a brand new section of Revit open. It doesn't just-- there's not a way to get to that, that I know of.

CINDY WOOD: Depth cueing-- now, I'm not going to lie. This one is not perfect. But it's better than what we used to have before. The question I seem to get most often from project managers is your elevations look flat. And they did, you know?

We had everything looking like it's all in the same plane. We would put filled regions over things. We would make things lighter. We would punch it with detail lines, all those little things to try to make it look a little more lifelike, like the project managers like. But now with depth cueing, you can make things look lighter the further they are away.

VICKIE PATEL: Yeah, so to go back to the topic earlier, so you can see that What's New here. So if you click on that, it's going to launch your browser and take you to whatever is new for that Revit version.

CINDY WOOD: So if you look at this one in plan, you can see if we were to take this south elevation, say, we have a whole bunch of different planes here. We have this plane in the front. We have this one. And then we have this one in the back. And when we take the elevation from here, normally, it just looks like everything is flat.

So example, this guy is the guy that's pretty far back. But it looks like everything's on the same plane. So if we go down here, and you go to Graphic Options, there is a Depth Cueing option. And now, if you show the depth, it does take a little bit of playing around to make it work. But now, you can see that this guy back here.

If you move it-- move it off a little bit just because this guy's in the back. So this guy shows up a lot lighter now than all the stuff in the front. So it does, like I say, take a little bit of messing around to get it right. But then you can also put it in a view template. And then once you get it right, you can apply it to multiple views.

3D orient to view-- this one, when you start working on larger projects, and you're like, oh, I just need to see a little bit of this floor plate. So you open up your big 3D view. And you take your section box. And you try to squish it into where you think you have to go.

If you have your view set up, say, like a floor plan, you can make your 3D view cut to that floor plan based on the view range of that plan. So this is a little guy. But you can see this is my overall 3D view. This list can get a little long if you have a ton of floor plans.

VICKIE PATEL: And unfortunately, there's not a search. So you do have to just pick. So you can see that it orients it. Now, if I rotate, you'll see it's been cropped off. So this is also good, especially in plan views, where sometimes you've got a floor plan view, and you cannot figure out why something's not showing up.

If you do this for your floor plan view, it's cutting it at that cut plane. So then if that element is not showing up there, you can see that, oh, wait. It's actually floating up in my space. And that's why it's not showing up. Or something about it might just be a little bit above that cut plane, therefore it's not showing up on your floor plan.

Same thing with sections-- sometimes your section box-- your section view depth isn't as deep. So you're like, why am I not seeing that in my section? You do this with the section. Again, you're going to get that sliver of your building, so you can figure out why you're not seeing that.

CINDY WOOD: Keyboard shortcuts-- I love keyboard shortcuts. And when you get AutoCAD users that come over into Revit, they keep doing their shortcuts and don't like the Revit shortcuts. And I did it this way in AutoCAD, and stuff like that. Well, you can make your own keyboard shortcuts. If you liked the letter sequence that you used in AutoCAD, you can make your own in Revit.

The only thing is once you get another version on your computer, it's not going to take your keyboard shortcuts with it. So you do have to-- down here there's export and import buttons. You do have to export your keyboard shortcuts to a text file. And then you can bring it into your new version of Revit how you like.

And it's also for your computer only. So I do get myself in trouble a little bit. Sometimes, I go to someone else's computer. And I'm like, but, wait, I had this for managed links. We've got check the links, managed links. Oh, right. So you do have to remember that.

VICKIE PATEL: And another thing too-- so the built in keyboard shortcuts that are within Revit itself-- hopefully, most everybody knows this. But if you hover over it, if there's already a default shortcut, you'll see that there's a parentheses WA, so WN window. So those are also there for you as a tool tip. So if you just want to learn what the Revit ones are, so that they are standard across any machine that you might use, you can do that there.

CINDY WOOD: I find if I do any task more than three times in a row, I'm going to make a keyboard shortcut for it.

VICKIE PATEL: I'm not a keyboard shortcut person. I get on too many computers to where I'm like-- I'm like you. I screw up. And then I'm like, forget it.

CINDY WOOD: Yeah. All right, restoring backup files, so the server in my office was getting really full. And I had a project manager say, hey, we have all these files in this backup folder. Can we just delete all those? And I'm all like, slow your roll. We really-- if the project is done, fine. You can do that.

Maybe if we just passed a milestone, and we [INAUDIBLE] our models, fine. But do not touch those. They look weird. They're all like, oh, this is like a Rhino worksession. This is a slog file, whatever that is, data file. All these things go in there.

But the thing is, this is going to help you when your file crashes. So if you've set up your file to have a certain amount of backups, this is where it's going to save, in that backup folder. So if your file crashes and you want to go back to a previous version, this restore backup in the Collaborate tab is going to do it for you.

Then when you open it up, it's going to show all of the last saves to central. And your options that you can do is you can completely roll back that file, or you can save that file out separately. And you can look through it, see if it has what you need, and then maybe remake the central file.

VICKIE PATEL: So how many of you guys, whenever you create a central file, see that little option of backups, and just put in a number, had no idea. So you always want to put that to the max, which is only 999. You can't go over that. So always put that to the max because then you're going to get the most backups that you can possibly get.

CINDY WOOD: Because even, I think, the default is maybe 20 or something like that. But if you have five people working on your team, and they save every time that they sync to central, it's going to take up one of those maximum backup files. And you're only going to have a list of 20.

So if those people saved four times just in the morning or in an hour-- you never know how people save-- it's going to take up all of those. And if you start crashing at the end of the day, you might only be able to go back 20 minutes or 30 minutes, where, really, something, you realize, screwed up in the morning or screwed up yesterday. You want to be able to go back and check that file.

VICKIE PATEL: So we're obviously not going to do a rollback here, but just to show you. If you go under managed? It's there, right?

CINDY WOOD: Collaborate.

VICKIE PATEL: Collaborate, and restore backups. So we don't have any here because this is temp file. But it would go directly to that backup location. And then you would see all those files that you have. You pick the one, and then you get the option to do it.

CINDY WOOD: Section box versus selection box-- so you can get this auto section box, which is a free plug-in. And also there's one built into newer versions of Revit, which is this guy right here. The main difference between the two of them is the one that's built in to Revit is going to crop your main 3D view, whereas the auto section box is going to create a new view that you can keep and reference later.

I tend to use that when it comes to stairs, or something like that. And I'm going to be drawing my stairs in multiple views. And I want to refer back to that 3D view. I'm going to make it with the auto section box.

VICKIE PATEL: The other option with the auto section box is that you have this option here called arrange side by side. So you can have the view that you were working in, and then see the 3D section boxed off of it side by side.

CINDY WOOD: So this is another way to not make it so you have to open up your big 3D view, and then crop it to where you want. It's going to pick-- you don't have to pick everything that you want to see. You just have to pick the area. So if I pick something in this corner down here and something in this corner down here, it's going to give me a 3D view of everything in between.

VICKIE PATEL: Yeah, so since I just did that door. But again, it didn't give me any options. So again, I couldn't pick how much it went around that door. By default, it just does that versus if I did-- this is fine-- the Auto Coin. So that one is under Add Ins, actually, Manage. No.

CINDY WOOD: It should be Add. Oh, cool. I didn't even load it into 2019. This is what's great about the live demo. I was like, hey, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to upgrade my 2018 to 2019 and load it.

VICKIE PATEL: Yeah, So I mean, when you select the item, you'll get this dialog box once you click the tool over here. And again, like I said, there's an option to do arrange window side by side. And then there's also a buffer. So if you wanted to, say, the door plus five feet around it to see if you had any clearance issues around that door, or whatnot, you could put that in. And then it would do that size of a selection box.

CINDY WOOD: Displaced views is just a fancy name for exploded axonometric. This also is something that you don't know you need it until you need it. I mean, back in my days of school, I used to draw it by hand. And I loved drawing those exploded axonometrics. But I was like, I don't know where I'm ever going to use them.

But sometimes, if you need to show things pulled off, you want to pull off a wall, so you can see inside in your 3D view, you can do it with displaced views. It's going to be that view only. So it's not going to screw up your stuff. You're not actually moving the wall. You're just displacing it for that view to see something different. The thing is with it is the button doesn't highlight until you highlight stuff in the model.

VICKIE PATEL: Yeah. so if I select, let's just say, this, and then turn that on, you'll see that you get the little Move icon. You can pull that out. You can move it to the left and right, so that now you can see within the building.

A nice little thing that goes along with this-- I might be jumping ahead. But you have this option down here under one of your visibility options. So the worst thing that can happen is somebody else gets on this project. They have no idea that this-- they come to this view. And they have no idea that you used the displaced setting to move that off.

So they think that the roof, or whatever, has been moved. And they're trying to adjust it. And they can't. But if you click on this, it will highlight that this element has actually just been displaced, so that you have a cue to know that, hey, this is really actually where it's supposed to be. But for this view, we've pulled it apart.

AUDIENCE: You've got a question over here.

CINDY WOOD: Mm-hmm.

AUDIENCE: Can you displace the elements through a linked model?

VICKIE PATEL: No. So the question was can you displace elements from a linked model? And no, you can't.

CINDY WOOD: Workshare display and workshare monitor-- so two different things. Workshare display-- I call it the "big brother" tool. It's a way-- I always-- OK, the thing I do the worst is I draw things on the wrong workset every day. This is one where you can highlight your worksets, the colors.

It'll show you what they're drawn on. It's also going to show you who has elements checked out as well as who placed it and who last touched it. So that's why I call it the "big brother" tool. It's going to show me who modified it. I know-- good, bad.

But when you do what we do all the time, and you find that, hey, someone put this exam room here. And they copied it 200 times. I had that happen one time, where I had 400 extra elements of something. I'm not going to lie, I'm going to find out who did that. And I'm going to go make them fix it. So that's workshare display. And this guy's at the bottom. Oh.

VICKIE PATEL: So I used to use this when I was working on projects too. I used it as my working view. This way, if I turned it on, and I turned just to show the worksets. If I started drawing something, and it was the wrong color, I had a cue automatically that I'm drawing on the wrong workset. It still is a step. You've got to go turn that on.

But it's better than-- if my view is not in color, I know I'm not doing something right. So you've got the different options, like Cindy said, here. So you can look at owners. And if you, I guess, this one's not--

CINDY WOOD: Hover. You hover.

VICKIE PATEL: Yeah, if you hover it, it'll give you that information.

CINDY WOOD: Yeah, it's going to tell you who it was created by and who last moved it, which it's all me. So also if you detach your model, you're going to own everything. So if you're trying to troubleshoot for somebody, and you detach the model, it's all going to be you.

AUDIENCE: Does your "big brother" tool tell you if something's been deleted?

CINDY WOOD: There is that function. But I honestly feel like I can never get it to work.

VICKIE PATEL: So if you do this Model Updates, it does depend on your model-- the workshare frequency updates and the options here. If you've got that set to all the time, then it should update. So it will tell you-- it will highlight that this element has been deleted in the central, or it's been moved. So it does do that.

But you have to make sure that that frequency within your options is set to the most possible. The other thing, with the detach, if you create a new central, then, again, it's going to be whoever created that new central is the new owner of everything. Yes.

AUDIENCE: You said you have to crank the worksharing frequency all the way to the right. Is that you the investigator has to have done that or the person who created the objects?

VICKIE PATEL: Everybody because if that is cranked up to the top, now the central model is communicating to your local model more frequently, so that it can, then, share that with everybody else. So everybody on the team has to have that cranked up to the highest possible.

CINDY WOOD: How are we for time?

VICKIE PATEL: [INAUDIBLE] And then workshare monitor, again, we're not going to get anything here because we've got nobody else in here. But if you go to Collaborate-- is that where that one is? I forget.

CINDY WOOD: That one's add-ins as well.

VICKIE PATEL: So you have--

CINDY WOOD: Launch WSM. So that's going to bring up a thing that shows you who else is in the model and if they're syncing, so that you don't save over top of each other at the same time. It doesn't work if you're working on Revit Server. And it doesn't work if you're working on the cloud. But if you've worked in the cloud before, you know that there's the Communicator.

VICKIE PATEL: And it's probably not going to load up. Sometimes it does take a little bit. A few caveats with it, sometimes it is glitchy. You see ghosted people in there. So sometimes it's been left over from last night. And that person is not even in the office, but some reason it still shows them there.

CINDY WOOD: See. There's two of me, apparently. I wish there was two of me, sorry, sometimes.

VICKIE PATEL: The other thing I liked about it is that as the BIM manager on a project-- and I haven't done it in so long, so I can't remember-- you can come in here and look at the history. So you can see, when somebody reaches out to you, and says, hey, I can't save. And you go in there and look that they haven't saved in over a day.

You're like, what's going on? Why aren't you saving like you're supposed to? So this is cool. And you can export this out. So if you need to keep a log of it, you can change the frequency here too of how long-- how many days back you can see it.

CINDY WOOD: It does show editing requests too. So if somebody is trying to move something that you own, and they're requesting it, it's going to show up there as well.

VICKIE PATEL: Just one other thing about it, it also gives you the time. So if you guys are having any issues on your network, and you're trying to validate that and show that, hey, we're all having longer save times. But we weren't yesterday. You can pull this up and show them that, hey something has happened. We went from 5 minutes to 45 minutes over the period of a day.

CINDY WOOD: Temporary view properties-- this is a way to make sure that when you're working, say, on a sheet view or something, and you need to see past something-- I've had it seen where somebody hid the floors, and then pressed Print. And so then those didn't go out nicely to the client. If you use these temporary view properties, it'll make it so you can change what you're seeing. But like I said, it is only temporary. So it's not going to stay there.

This comes into play a lot when you have view templates, right? So you have view template on your view. And rather than go into that view template, change something, and then have to remember to go change it back before you print, you can do that with this. Do I even have that view?

VICKIE PATEL: [INAUDIBLE] So if I apply a view template to this view-- and I'm just going to pick one of ours. And I don't want to see the clearance boxes around our doors here, just for whatever I'm doing. If I try to go to Visibility Graphics, it's grayed out because it's being controlled by a view template.

If I come over here now, I can click on this, and hit Enable Temporary View Properties. Or you can apply another view template. So if you have a view template where you have these settings that are your working settings, you can temporarily apply that template here, and then remove it when you're done. So if you click the Enable, now, if I go to Visibility Graphics, you'll see things are not grayed out.

So if I come to the doors, I can come and turn off that ADA clearance. It's not there. And then I can just hit Restore View Properties. Or if I close out of the view, it's going to go back to its original view state. And whenever I open it, it's with whatever the View Template properties are.

And the nice thing about all of these little options down here, when you're in that, there's that little purple little sub window on it. So you know that you're adjusting a temporary setting and not a View Template setting or the view that's on the sheet.