Organizing Electrical Plans and Sheets in Revit

Let's get started setting up our sheets for our midterm. If we take a look in our project browser, we will find our sheets area down near the bottom. Right now we have one sheet available.

It's the E001. We'll double click to open that up and there's not a whole lot going on yet, but we'll add a little bit to this sheet and create several more. So at number one we have the title Elementary School Electrical.

Let's go ahead and add another line below that. We can do text and let's pick a size. Right now it's 1 eighth, which is pretty small.

Let's go ahead and try 3 eighths and we'll click right below the E of Elementary School and we can put mid term and we can put our name first and last. Click the modify button and adjust it. Make sure it's just below our main title.

That looks pretty good. Now we want to add in our list of sheets and that's found under Schedules, Quantities, Schedule Typical, and then Sheet Index. We'll drag that in and drop it to the right of the L right here.

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It's pretty meager right now, but it will grow automatically as we add in more sheets. Now let's make this look more official with some electrical specifications. If we go up to our Legends, we notice Specifications Electrical.

We can drag and drop that in and it will fit right on the right side next to the title block. So kind of center it on that right side. Click and we'll place it.

Now we might notice that there is a title here and a title here. We don't need to be redundant, so in the Properties of this view, we can change it to Viewport No Title because we already have a title right there within the legend itself. Now that's looking pretty good.

Let's zoom in to the title block and see what we can change here. For the project number, we can call this Midterm. For Drawn By, we can add our own name.

So first and last name. And that's it. That looks pretty good for our cover sheet for the midterm at this point.

Now let's go ahead and add some additional sheets. First off, we'll go back to our sheet label in the Project Browser and right-click and click New Sheet. We want the VDCI 30x42 and we will click OK.

That opens it up. Now this will be for our electrical analysis. So let's jump down to the title block first and we'll change the number.

So the number wants to be E010. And then it's currently unnamed, so we'll click there and we'll call this Electrical Analysis. We've got the midterm.

That carried through from the previous sheet and will stick with us until we change it. But we can add our Drawn By again. First and last.

That looks pretty good for our title block. Now we need to add some views. And if you recall, the views for our analysis are up here in the Project Browser.

They're under Electrical, Floor Plans, Electrical Analysis. Let's double-click on that first one, L1 Electrical Analysis. It's currently set to 8th scale, 1 eighth inch equals a foot, which is pretty big for the sheet.

And it's more of a diagram. So let's go ahead and drop that scale down to 1 inch equals 20 feet. And that will adjust the scale.

We'll give it a moment. There we go. And we have this setup here for our elevations.

And we don't need to display that on this sheet. We'll click one time, right-click, Hide in View, Category. Don't need to show those elevations.

So that one looks pretty good. Let's go to L2, Electrical Analysis. And we'll make a couple of those same moves.

Number one, we'll change the scale to 1 inch equals 20 feet. And once it makes that scale change, we can close them. So close L2, close L1.

And now we can drag and drop them onto our sheet. So first, the L1 Electrical Analysis. Once it loads, I can click one time to place it up near the top.

And then we'll do the same for L2. Drag and drop L2 right below it. If we move the mouse around just slightly, we can get a little bit of an alignment line to let us know that they are centered on each other.

That little green dashed line. Drop that. Those look pretty good.

I might click the top one and adjust the title bar down and pull it closer to the plan. Then I'll click on L2 and do the same type of move. Sometimes I'll move it first near the other one.

You can see that aligns them. Then I can click on the plan and adjust this tail length. And now I know they're exactly the same and lined up.

Now I can click and drag it straight down and they'll be in alignment with each other. Alright, those look pretty good. Now we can add some additional information to our analysis.

Let's go to our schedules. We have our schedules. We have our electrical analytical load schedule.

Let's drag and drop that up in the top right corner of our screen. Somewhere right there. Then we have our bus schedule.

We can drag and drop and place that right below our load schedule. We can line those up as well. Now we can go back to our legends.

We're looking for our area based load legend. We'll drag and drop and place that right here below our schedules. We'll notice that it comes through with its own title and yet it has a title so we can click this and change that to no title.

That looks pretty awesome. We've got a lot of content here explaining the analysis for our building. That was fun.

Let's create another sheet. Right here in sheets we can right click and say new sheet. The VDCI 30x42.

Click ok. I want to zoom in and give this one a name and a number. Right now it's E011.

It actually wants to be E E130. Enter locks that in. The name we want to give it is lighting plan level 1. Lighting plan and then I'll put a little dash.

Level 1. We can add our drawn by information as well. First and last. We're all set.

We've got our title block set up. Now we need to actually add that lighting plan. Let's zoom up to it here.

Pull this up. We're looking for our electrical ceiling plan and our level 1. Let's make sure we can see the entire sheet first so it's easier to drag and drop. I'll drag and drop that lighting plan.

We'll let this load. Here it is. It's pretty big so we'll click to drop it.

We'll set the scale. If I double click here it's currently set to 1 eighth of an inch equals a foot, which is a common architectural scale. A good scale but it doesn't fit on the page.

We might need to make the decision to change the scale from 1 eighth down to 3 thirty seconds. We'll do that. It's not letting me do that.

Why would that be? If we recall we created a view template for this. We have to change it in the view template. Let's go back up to our properties and we will find the view template.

It says electrical ceiling. We'll click that and here is where we can change the view scale. It's currently 1 eighth.

We'll change it to 3 thirty seconds and click OK. That will take a moment to process and it should now fit better on our screen. There it is.

I want to double click out of it make sure it's not selected anymore and move it right into place. That's looking pretty good. My view title here is kind of huge.

You can see the super big line here. I might move it up a little bit. If I click on the view I can adjust it's length.

We'll pull that across and we'll move it into place. Now I moved the whole thing accidentally so I'm going to hit CTRL Z make sure I'm only selecting this guy. Move it into place.

That's a lot better. Alright. What this sheet could use are some sheet notes.

Let's do that. Let's go back up to or down to our legends. We have a lighting plan general notes.

We'll drag and drop that up into this upper left corner. Looks like we have some space here so we'll drop it up in that corner. Click once to place it.

Again we have that issue where we have a title and a title so we'll change it to no title. That looks pretty good. Maybe use an arrow key to adjust it and we are all set.

That looks really good. Let's duplicate this plan because it's all set up so nicely. I'm going to right click on it and I'm going to say duplicate sheet.

This time I'm going to duplicate it with the views. I want all of that to come through. Let's duplicate with the views and I want to duplicate with detailing.

One view on the sheet will be duplicated as well. I don't want to do that so let's go ahead and say cancel. Right click one more time.

Duplicate sheet. Let's just duplicate with the sheet detailing. Get the information we can.

It did bring over one view. The lighting plan general notes and that's perfect. It's a good place to start.

Now we can zoom in and change our title block. Pretty easy changes now. Instead of level 1 it's level 2. Instead of E130 it's going to be E140.

Everything else came through looking really good. All we need to do now is drag and drop our other view. Let's go back up to our electrical ceiling plan, level 2 lighting plan and drag and drop that here.

It's going to take a moment to process and we'll place it on our sheet. Here it is. I'm going to hover to about where I think it will belong and click one time.

That's looking good. I'm going to click on that view and shorten the view tag. Tighten it up a bit.

I'll click away and click it again to move it into place. Now it looks like this plan needs to come down and to the left a little bit. Let me share a trick that I use because it can be tricky to line up these plans from sheet to sheet.

If I go back to E130 and assume this is my base plan, I can zoom in to a known corner. For example, this corner of the building right here. I can draw a detail line just touching that corner and I'll just drag it out to the side.

Now I'll select that line and I will copy it right here. Copy to clipboard. Then I'll go to E140 and then enter paste.

I can do paste aligned to current view. There it is. That line is in the same place on E130 and E140.

If I move my plan, click and drag to the end of that line, they'll be about lined up on both pages. One little way to make sure your plans are in the same place on both pages. I just have to remember to delete that line when I'm done.

That looks great. Just two more sheets to go. Let's go down to our sheets and create those final two sheets.

I'll right click onto sheets and say new sheet. I'll do the E1 for VDCI and click OK. Let's name it here.

This one is going to be called enlarged lighting plans. I'll give that a name. Enlarged lighting plans.

We need to do our draw by first and last. The number of this sheet here will be E 430. First off, we need our notes for lighting plan.

The cool thing is we have them on the previous sheet. Let's go back to our E140. I will select the lighting plan general notes.

There it is, selected. I can copy it, go to E430 and then paste, align to current view. It shows up in the exact same place.

Now I can add my enlarged lighting plans. We'll have to make some adjustments to get these to fit. We'll start with the gymnasium.

It's pretty big. If we drag and drop that in it's going to fill our whole page likely. Let's click one time.

There it is. Filling our whole page. Let's double click and we can change the scale down here.

We will do 1 8th inch scale. We'll click away a couple times and we can adjust the size of its view tag and pull it down a little bit. Now we can drag in our typical classroom lighting plan.

It's a much smaller room so we can just drag it in as is. Line up those tags and we can shorten the tag length. Once I have these I can center them on the page and I'm good with this sheet.

Just one more to go. Let's go down to our sheet yet again and I will right click where it says sheets and new sheet BDCI E1 and click OK. Now we want our switchboard schedule and one line diagram.

Let's give this one a name. It's the switchboard schedule and one line diagram. It's number is E700 and it's drawn by us so first and last.

We want to populate this page with a few items. First we want our switchboard schedule. We're going to go back to our schedules.

We'll find panel schedules. Open that up and we want our main distribution board. I'm going to drag and place that onto the sheet.

We'll click one time. Now it's not completely populated yet but as we keep working it will add additional load into that schedule. That looks pretty good right now.

Now let's jump over and we want to add in a panel board nameplate. This might be something that an electrical designer might add to help the contractor place appropriate labels on each panel board. Let's go over to our legends and we have a panel board nameplate.

We'll drag and drop that here and place it on the right. Again it has it's own title so we can change it's title to viewport no title and that looks really good. Last but not least, our super exciting one line diagram.

We're going to find that here in our views. We have our drafting views and our one line diagram. We'll drag and drop that here onto the sheet right in the bottom middle.

There it is, our awesome one line diagram. We'll click on that and change the view tag. In fact we don't need double so we can go ahead and change that again to no title.

We are all set. Those are all of the midterm sheets.