Revit Parameter Data and File Size

[dtpeter2901]

I've been asked to look a ways to make our room data process more efficient.  Currently, all of the design information for the room gets entered into an excel sheet and lives separately from the room.  We'd like all that data to live in the model, but I was a little concerned overloading the model with data.

I'd be looking at adding about 30 shared parameters to the rooms category for users to fill out.

I did a test on a decent sized project with about 330 rooms and filled out all of the data (I should note, I did them all as text parameters) and applied it to the rooms.  When i saved, it'd seemed to only add about 1MB to the file size.  Which made me rather excited at first.   But then I thought maybe I'm missing something.  

Which leads me to my question.

Dose anyone know if there's a correlation between file size and the number of shared parameters you might have filled out.

My plan was to have all of the room information live in the design model, but link it to a separate model to generate views, sheets and schedules for each room in a separate model.  So really all I'm doing is adding about 30 room parameters to a model and filling them out. 

Wondering if I'm missing anything here.  Or should I have that information live in a separate model  along with the views and printable sheets.

Thanks in advance!

[SteveKStafford · Accepted solution]

Data is what it's for. That is the last kind of thing you need to worry about. File size is also a very minor measure of a project's performance. I'd gladly sacrifice some file size for integrated data instead of a fragmented workflow in and out of Revit to Excel.

[ToanDN · Accepted solution]

I had a master plan project that I added over 50 parameters to store the attributes of the buildings (mass elements). They are great for creating different color scheme plans, scheduling, and ultimately, DBlink to an Access database to query Reports and generate Charts in Excel.

The only side effect is the properties panel will get very long so try to organize the parameters into groups so that you can collapse them if needed.

With a large number of parameters, look into using key schedule(s) to populate the data more systematically. The only drawback with key schedules is that they do not accept shared parameters. So if you need Room tags showing the parameters, you cannot use the ones populated by key schedules.

That begs a question, do you really to use shared parameters, or should non-shared parameters be adequate?