Learn about keynotes, an essential tool for documenting drawings, and the process of creating custom keynotes to better suit the needs of your projects. This article delves into the mechanics of utilizing tab delimited text files to generate project-specific keynotes and effectively add them to your project.
Key Insights
- Keynotes, a useful feature for documenting drawings, are created from tab delimited text files. It's a feature that hasn't yet been integrated into the software, leading to the creation of custom keynotes files.
- Apart from using the keynotes installed with the program, one can create a new keynote file through Windows Explorer. Naming the file according to the project can help increase organization and efficiency.
- After creating the new keynote file, it's linked to the project in Revit by setting the path to 'Relative' and browsing to the file's location. Although the file might initially be empty, keynotes can be added later to cater to the specific needs of the project.
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Another feature that we have that we can use to help document our drawings is keynotes, and keynotes are created from a text file that is what's called tab delimited, meaning each column is defined by a tab between the previous one, and it's been pretty frustrating for the past almost 20 years now that this hasn't become a integrated feature into the software, and I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea why it's not yet, but essentially what we end up doing is we have to create a file that is a text file that we can use, and so I essentially would just create a new text file that we can use as a keynote file, and we can use that to add keynotes to our project, and so if I were to go into my annotate tab here where it says keynote, if I click on the bottom side of that, you can see it says keynote settings, and from here we have options of where we can add a new file to that, and so we can even look at the one that's installed with the program, and so if I were to click view here, you can see it'll pop up, and what we have is keynotes broken down by master format divisions, and a bunch that have already been added, so if we were to add, say, a keynote for our elevator, we can go to division 14 for conveying equipment, and I can find the elevator, whether it's hydraulic or a different type of elevator here. I can go in and I can say, okay, I'll pick the hydraulic elevator, and then I can pick this as my keynote, and so 142400.a1 would be the keynote. That's a pretty intense keynote, and a lot of times you'll find that the ones that you're trying to use for your project don't typically exist in here, and this list is so exhaustive that you end up either using two different keynotes to represent the same thing, or you just can't find what you're looking for, period, so I like to create a new one that's a custom method that we use, and so there's two different ways that it can be numbered, either by keynote, which is going to represent this number that we were just looking at here, or you can do it by sheet, which would then just use a consecutive order like 1,2, 3,4, 5,6, 7, and so on.
Typically, I try to use by keynote so that I have a unique number for each keynote. If you do by sheet, then your numbers aren't going to be the same from sheet to sheet, and that can cause some confusion, so what I would do here is to create a new keynote file. I would do this in our Windows Explorer, so this is just my Explorer window for my computer here, and if you right-click and go to New, you can actually just say New Text Document, and then I can give this a new name and call it BIM 302 Keynotes, and so that's now my keynote file for this project, and once I link it in, it'll be the one that we'll use for our project here, and so if I were to go back to Revit, now that I have this file here, I can go ahead and copy the path, just a quick shortcut for myself there, and then if I go to Browse and pick a new location, it'll allow me to pick a new path, but the first thing I want to do is make sure I set this to Relative, and then I'll go to Browse, because if you go to outside of a library locations, you'll just get a warning, and so we'll just avoid that warning by clicking Relative here.
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So I'll go to Browse, and it'll pop up our window here, and if I were to just paste in my path and navigate to my Class Files folder here, I can pick this BIM 302 Keynotes file. It's currently empty, but we're going to take care of that, and if I click Open, it'll reload the table, and unfortunately if I go to View, it's just blank here, and we're going to look at how we can add keynotes to that file in the next video.
