Simplified Overview of Schedule in Revit 2013

Overview of Schedules in Revit 2013

This post will demonstrate how the schedule information is linked to the project and how you can work through the schedule in Revit Architecture 2013.
Although, I am writing about Revit in this post,(I will be writing about ArchiCAD Schedule in my subsequent posts) however, it is worth to mention that no matter what BIM Software is being used, the basis of Scheduling in BIM Software is to help  perform several quality assurance measures in your model or drawing and the main idea is that you use schedules to track elements within the model based on some certain criteria which could be Cost, Performance, Material usage, e.t.c.

The Overview
Start a new Schedule from View Tab

 

Notice there are five types of schedule. You have to go through the same process to create these schedules. But  the first two (Schedule/Quantities and Material Takeoff) when clicked ,will ask you to choose a category before proceeding to the Schedule Properties.

CATEGORY TIP

If you are not sure what category the element/component you are trying to schedule belongs to, select the element in your project and leave your cursor on it for some seconds, Revit will display some information about this element, the first that comes in the row is the category. In the example below, WALL will be the category to select.

 

SCHEDULE PROPERTIES

The Schedule properties dialog box allows you to tell Revit what you want the schedule to report and how you want to display them. We will go through the five Properties Tabs one after the other. 
Field, Filter, Sorting/Grouping, Formatting and Appearance.

1. FIELDS

The Fields tab lets you select the data that will appear in your schedule. Think about this process as selecting the parameters or the fields that will appear as the HEADER in your table.

You can create more fields that are not listed in the Available fields box, this can be done by using Add Parameters, Calculated Value or by adding the data directly to the elements in the project.

2. FILTER
Think about Filter as hiding what you don't want to see in the schedule. You basically have to select what you want to see and the rest will be hidden. See example below.

3. SORTING/GROUPING
The Sorting/Grouping tab lets you control the order in which information is displayed and which elements control that order.

4. FORMATTING

 

5. APPEARANCE

Note. Apart from "Show Title" and "Show Header" in the text appearance box ,and "Blank row before Data"  every other change you make in the appearance tab will only be seen when you drag your schedule into a sheet. The image below shows an example of a schedule on a sheet.

This tutorial gives the basic workflow in Revit Schedule and I hope it helps someone. Thank you for reading and please do not hesitate to leave comments or feedback if you have found this blog useful.