To tag, or not to tag

To tag, or not to tag, that is your problem in a Revit session. This is analogue to "To be, or not to be", the famous opening phrase of a soliloquy in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, and the fundamental question and answer is there.

Most of the Revit users will agree that tagging an object will give more benefits rather than using the Revit command Annotation, Text. Once an object needs be revised, the annotation will be automatically changed while using Text, you got to do it manually, a tedious work in the long run.

My recommendation: Always do tagging an object. There are several built-in parameters present in all Family Category. Why not take sometime to review your families and start adding your favorite tags.

I hope this will inspire you to work more efficient in annotating your Revit drawings.

Section Symbols Disappear

A sophisticated program like Revit has many options and settings and you can expect sometimes that a user will get lost and be frustrated in controlling the visibility graphics for a particular view. One of our design team members asked me why his Section Symbols disappeared suddenly in one of his plan views. There are many reasons why a Section Symbol may not show up in a view. Below are some pointers you can follow to solve this visibility issue.

- Check if Section category is on.
- Check Hidden Elements and unhide them if the Elements are hidden thru the Option Bar.
- Section Mark will not show up in a plan view in case the Crop Region for a section view does not “intersect” a plan view’s Cut Plane.

- Inspect the section view, select View Properties, and adjust the Hide at scales coarser than a given value.

- If you are applying Phases in a later design stage, most probably the Section Symbols reside in phase New Construction and this is no longer an active phase.

View Template versus Phases in Revit

Do you know that a View Template will lock down some of the settings in your working view? With a second thought, why should I apply a View Template? It involves a lot of fine tuning (extra work) while doing a drafting work, especially if it involves Phasing and Phases Filter.

My advice, keep a solution that simply works.

Cannot Change a View Property in Revit?

A common question in our office especially the newbie users.

Problem: You want to use the Properties palette to change a view property, but the property displays in gray, and you cannot change it.

Issue: The property may be controlled by a view template.

Solution: Do one of the following:

- Modify the assigned view template: On the Properties palette, click the value for View Template. In the Apply View Template dialog, under View Properties, change the value of the target view property, or clear Include so the view template no longer controls that property.

Important: The change to the view template affects all other views that are dependent on the template.

- Disassociate the view from the template: On the Properties palette, for View Template, select None.

The view is no longer linked to the template. The view retains its current properties, but future changes to the template will not affect the view.

- Assign a new template to the view: On the Properties palette, click the value for View Template. On the Apply View Template dialog, select another template that defines the target property as desired, or that does not define the property at all so you can define the property for each individual view.

Source: Autodesk Wikihelp