Room Schedule by Sheet?

[Anonymous]

Greetings,

We have a requirement by the client for a room schedule on each sheet.  I know you can schedule keynotes and revisions by sheet.  Is it possible to schedule rooms by sheet? 

Creating a room schedule and filtering by floor and dragging that into a sheet isn't the solution.  In smaller buildings, it's possible to have multiple floors on a sheet.  In larger buildings, a single floor may be split onto a couple of sheets.

Any ideas?

Thank,

Dave.

[rosskirby]

Go to your room schedule, and add a project parameter called "Schedule name" or something similar, and then assign a value for that parameter to each room (i.e. Schedule 1, Schedule 2, etc.).  Then filter your schedules by that parameter (i.e. "Schedule name" --> "equals" --> "Schedule 1") and hide that column.

[Anonymous]

That may work for smaller buildings, I guess. 

What happens in a very large, multi-storied building, where each floor is shown on multiple floors?  It may become easy for the user to place the room on the incorrect schedule, or neglect to fill the data in that particular parameter all together.

If an enlarged plan is called out, and placed on another sheet, the rooms shown on both sheets will have to appear in both sheet schedules, yet rooms not shown in the enlarged plan callout must not appear in the room schedule for that sheet.

I was hoping there was a method to do this "automagically", to remove the user error factor.

Dear Autodesk, can we add this to the wish list?

[rosskirby]

You can't do what you want with a single schedule.  You'll have to set up multiple schedules, each with filters for the rooms you do or do not want to display.  For example, when you want to only show a few of the rooms, which are associated with an enlarged partial plan, you'll have a schedule that's filtered to show only those.  When you have the entire floor plan, just omit the filter.  Since you're only going to enlarge the same area each time (floor plan, RCP, finish plan, demo plan, whatever), you should use a scope box for consistency, then define the parameter for each room to control which schedule it shows up in.

There might be other approaches for how you document the project, but without knowing exactly what room data you're trying to schedule, I can't offer much more help.

[Anonymous]

We have a similar issue.

As part of the Employer Requirements, we receive Room Data Sheets that contain data that would typically include:

Room Name

Room Area

Room Volume

Finishes (Floor, Walls, Ceilings)

Environmental Data (Thermal, acoustic, lighting performance requirements)

Fixtures and Fittings

etc.......

They are asking for similar Room Data Sheets to be generated from the model so that it can be used as a reporting device to check the design against the brief. In an ideal world, it could be possible to set the sheets up and drive some of the data from the sheets (this won't always be possible - ie. room area).

In this case, it is more information than would typically be reported in the Room Schedule, but in principal, I see no reason why we couldn't compile such data - other than the same problem - how do you set up sheets for each room ?

The added complexity - is that they also want the data to reflect the COBie UK 2012 structure - which will require a significant amount of data per room.

Any suggestions on how this could be achieved would be really appreciated.

Martin

[rosskirby]

Martin,

I've got a few ideas that might help, although they'll be a bit difficult to communicate, so bear with me.

For most of what you want, a standard room schedule would do.  You can even add a parameter for "Programmed Area", and a parameter for "Area Difference" that calculates the difference between the actual and programmed areas, and conditional formatting that show the area difference as red or green depending on whether it's off the programmed area by more than a certain amount.

For the elements within those rooms, you can (in 2013 and later releases) do embedded schedules (furniture, fixtures, fittings, etc.) within that room schedule.

Now, for the fun part.  Rather than trying to make a separate schedule for each room, since it sounds like you want to issue a separate letter-sized sheet for each room, try this.  Create one schedule for all the rooms.  Then create a sheet layout that consists of however many letter-sized sheets you want, all arranged in a grid (something like 10 rows and columns of letter-sized sheets).  Then place the schedule on this multi-sheet, and split/rearrange it so that each room is "broken out" and on it's own sheet.  Print that multi-sheet to a single PDF, then from Adobe reader, print that PDF with the tiling function turned on, and voila, instant multi-letter-sized sheets, one for each room.

Hope that helps, and sorry if some portions of it weren't clear.  Let me know if I can be of further assistance (if I was of assistance at all in the first place).

[Anonymous]

Thanks Ross,

Seems like an innovative approach. I haven't yet used embedded schedules - so it didn't really factor in as a likely solution, but I can see what you mean.

To me, it looks like a great potential solution - although Revit has a habit of taking those and finding a nice spanner shaped hole!

I'll have a play around with it, would be great if it works.

As you are probably already aware, the COBie data that we need to have within the Revit file, ultimately ends up as a spreadsheet. My idea (after posting the query) was to maybe take this spreadsheet data and use Excel to drive the Room Data sheet creation. It would mean however a deliberate export process each and every time we want to update the Room Data Sheets, so not ideal. Your potential solution is more elegant and useful.

It may be a few days before I can try it - stuck amidst deadlines for the moment, I'll let you know how I get on.

Thanks again,

Martin

[rosskirby]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks Ross,

...Revit has a habit of taking those and finding a nice spanner shaped hole!

Thanks again,

Martin

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Too true!  Like I said, any schedule where you have to incorporate huge amounts of custom data is going to be a nightmare to create, regardless of which software you use.  I think what you have to do is find the right balance between what you want, and what you can realistically expect to achieve.  

Are you going to get exactly what you want as a single, comprehensive schedule that auto-populates every field?  Nope.  Can you get a few separate schedules (some manual, some automatic), drawings, and files (Revit and non-Revit) that can be combined into a single entity that produces what you want?  Absolutely.  

Ultimately, how you get there is up to you, but please come back here as often as you want to post questions (and more importantly, results) so that we can all learn from the process.  If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I'm never the only one seeking and answer to a particular problem.  There's almost always someone else out there who wants to do the same thing, or even better, someone else who has already done it.

Good luck to you.