Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Create a Type Catalog

There is a relatively new feature available to create a type catalog automatically. Anyone who has tried to deal with this task using Revit MEP can relate to the awkwardness of trying to define the units for each parameter properly. The syntax and names used don't necessarily leap to mind.

If you visit the Application Menu > Export you'll find the Family Types option.


This does not create a perfect type catalog. By perfect I mean it may provide more parameters than you really intend to use in the catalog. That's because it will export them all. We often only provide the critical or most relevant values in a type catalog and leave others as default settings that all types will share. It works great if you want them all though.

Just to quibble though, I think that the name of the command ought to be Export > Type Catalog instead of Family Types. It would be more consistent with what the resulting file is called and used for, a Type Catalog.

1 comment:

Darren Snook said...

Hi Steve
I normally do all my type catalogue editing in csv format in excel and then copy them to text files using a batch script. In the case of using the 'Export Family Types' in Revit, you can export the text file, then create a blank csv file in excel, then use the import text file wizard in excel to bring the exported file in. What the wizard does is allow you to select which columns to bring in, so you can skip the ones you don't want. It would be nice though if Revit did a similar thing in the export in the first place. I also use a method of accessing type catalogues from within Revit families (http://revit-waterman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/type-catalogue-tips.html), which I've found makes life a lot easier when handling type catalogues