In this Click Saver I want to talk about an old trick that I use to use in Revit 2013 and below for working schedules. For working schedules I would always start them out with a prefix of “ZZ_” to announce to everyone that this a working a schedule and it wasn’t meant to be plotted or put on a sheet. Of course someone would break that rule at some point, so I learned that I could change the “Header” and “Body” text font to “wingdings”.
What was cool is that the display of the text in the schedule would look fine until you put it on a sheet and ShaZam it would look goofy.
Well after working with Revit 2014 and all of the nice updates to the schedule tools I noticed this trick no longer works. At first I was quite bummed but the reason for this change is because schedules are a “live” view to the sheet just like all of the other views. In other words, if you change the width of a column in your schedule view then it automatically updates on your sheet. Time will tell if this is what everyone likes and wants or this ranks up there with the “double-click issue in 2013, by the way this has been fixed in 2014.
So I came up with a new way to handle “working” schedules so that everyone recognizes that this schedule should not be placed on a sheet.
What is nice in Revit 2014 is you can now colorize the cells, so what I did is grab all of the columns (pick/drag) and give them a light red color to alert everyone that this is a working schedule. If they place this on a sheet it will display and print this way.
If you want to take it a step further with text fonts you could build a “ZZ_1 Arial” Text Type to use in the “Header” and “Body” in the Appearance tab for the working schedule. That way when it gets placed on the sheet the text is so huge that hopefully someone realizes their mistake.
I hope that this little trick can help everyone in developing better working schedules for your templates. See you in class, Jarod