REVIT Best Practices: Creating a Project Template Part 1 – Mental Preparation

28 Feb REVIT Best Practices: Creating a Project Template Part 1 – Mental Preparation

I have a love/hate relationship with templates.  I LOVE using templates, but I HATE setting them up. 

I am a huge advocate of having and using templates in a small firm to increase efficiency and productivity.  We have office templates (thanks EntreArchitect for generating our base files!) to generate proposals, do cost estimating, set up specification books and project binders.  We have AutoCAD templates for floor plans, elevations, building sections, etc. to standardize our workflow.  What about REVIT you ask?  Well, we have been using REVIT in our office since 2012 and still DO NOT have one!

I have been procrastinating setting up our REVIT project template for six full years.  I can never seem to find the time to dedicate to setting it up, even though I know in the long run it will save me countless hours generating consistent project documents as well as create an easy on-boarding system for new hires.  I think I mostly procrastinated because of how daunting the task of setting up the template would be.  How much information do I really need to input?  Do I need to load all of my annotation symbols?  Should I organize our digital library before I set it up (EEK!)?  Should I update our CAD templates (that havent been touched in eight plus years…) before I set it up?  Needless to say, I came up with a lot of excuses, but after having a few recent drawing sets print out with horrible graphics because I forgot to update the line weights and object styles (you know how fast track projects are…), I figures that it is something that cannot wait any more!

But where do you begin?  Well, I started with YouTube.  I watched a few tutorials to get my head around the process and how much work I was going to be getting into (40+ hours… you’ve got to be kidding me!).  Check out the ones I found most helpful below:

And after making some of my own notes, I went in search of a checklist I could use to break down the work into manageable tasks (i.e. a couple of hours a week).  Luckily, the AUTODESK KNOWLEDGE NETWORK has one!

Hmmmmmm… Let’s look for an easy task first…

Stay tuned!