Using the purge command

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After completing this lesson, you'll be able to understand purge and use the purge command.

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The objective domains covered are, 5.6a, understand and use purge.

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When new Revit projects are started, there were many families and styles that are preloaded that may or may not be used.

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To reduce the file size and improve performance, you can perform a purge.

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It is recommended that you purge a file at the project completion.

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Go ahead and open up the model 039-Using the purge command.

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The model opens up in a 3D view.

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To start the purge command, select the Manage ribbon and then select "Purge Unused".

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In the Purge Unused dialog box, we can now see a list of all the views, families, and other styles that we might want to purge from the project.

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By default, all of the items are checked.

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So in the bottom of the dialog box, you can see in our case here we have 627 items that are checked and can be purged.

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If I want to specify the items that I want to purge, I can say "Check None",

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in which case now we can see that 0 items are checked and then we can be selective about the items we wish to remove.

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For example, I could open up the Structural Framing category, and you can see here, I can't check these items,

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because I've probably used some of the types from that family, but these three items here, I could check and then remove.

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In this case, I'm going to select "Check All".

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Now purge is also capable of purging things like materials and appearances.

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Those elements cannot be purged until we've purged the families that maybe referencing those.

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So let's go ahead and select "OK".

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And we'll then go back and launch "Purge Unused" again, and you can now see we have much fewer items to be purged.

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But if you look at the bottom of the dialog box, there's still 32 items checked.

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And of course, as we just said, these are materials and assets.

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So now that we've removed the families that might be referencing these, we can then go ahead and purge these assets.

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And, of course, now we have a completely clean model.

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Let's now compare the file size.

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So here I'm going to save the project, you can just type perhaps PURGE afterwards.

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You'll notice I've done a "Save As" so I can compare the two.

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And we'll now compare the file size, and we can now see the difference between the two sizes.

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So here is our original file and here is our purged file.