User units different than project units

[Susana_Duarte_LMSI]

I'm working on a company now that likes to have their units in mm in the company revit models (because they worked that way in Autocad...). I personaly hate it because my backgroud is from architecture.

I think it would be like amazing that users could override for themselves the interface units without changing the model overrall units (that could interfer with tags and so on). A good tag should block the units anyway and not be dependent on the model units anyway...

Please implement this feacture if it's not much trouble.

PS: save these preferences, and user shortcuts, etc (all the option settings) in our autodesk account so we could save and load them easily to any revit version in any computer we use. I think you had that once (or maybe it was in Autocad) but I don't see that anymore when instaling a new version of the software. Even better if we could import those settings from another account, like when we change companies - after all, there is no sensitive information that should be protected in this transfer, I think.

[mhiserZFHXS]

There's a lot to unpack here. 

What are the different units you are referring to? Are you talking about changing from millimeters to feet and inches? Or from millimeters to meters? 

And what do you mean by "a good tag should block the units" and "not be dependent on the model units?" 

[Mike.FORM]

Just because the visual units are in millimeters you can still type values in dimensions in feet and inches and Revit will do the conversion.

Also you should learn both systems because in construction some things are standardized in imperial units and others are in metric units.

The architectural discipline doesn't only work in imperial.

Also there is a massive visual size difference between the 2 differing units.

2052 vs 6'-8 13/16"

[Susana_Duarte_LMSI]

Ok, not sure what needs to be unpacked. I think my explanation is clear, but the ideia is that I can do a simple move and click just "1" + enter to move 1 meter instead of "1000" + enter. I understand your trick @Mike.FORM of doing "1m" + enter would be enough, but it's just an extra key that I would like to avoid... I would adopt the "5mm" (even though it's 2 extra keys) faster than the "m" for meters... just because I use big dimentions in the project and not small almost 99% of the time... I leave the mm units for family editing.

I can agree that this is a user preference, so that's why I'm requesting a way to have a user overriding it. Think of it like some system options in Autocad that the user can override as well (and that give a warning if they are different than the company standards). 

My issue is with the Lenght and/or Distance units, but the same could be said for any of the other types (unlock this feature for all of them in my opinion).

And now that you talk about the imperial vs metric system, I can see why some country users might feel more confortable already using the units input with the value to switch the input units - that's not the case for metric center countries like mine... We only use inches for some pipe diameters and those are already set up in the template and converted. Let's just avoid the system preference talk because my sugestion is a little beyond that, ok.

Now, as of the question of the tags. I know that some folks like to create tags that follow the project units so that, if they change the units in the project, all the tags follow the same logic, but in my opinion that can be dangerous - because anybody can change that at any time and not be aware of the implications. You would have a better control by selecting the tags and change the type to something with the units you want to change to and having them overriding whatever units are defined in the project.

It's the same reason why tags don't have instance parameters - Autodesk thinks a tag should be the same by type anywhere - not that I agree in every situation. You should be confident about the output of a tag and not have it be dependent of the project units variation...

Hope my use text helped a bit with the situation...

And thank you @Mike.FORM, for your valuable input - it's still a nice trick that I may try to inforce - fingers crossed.

PS: I even changed my line shorcut to L+Space to have it the same as autocad... Old habits die hard 🙂