Revit 2020 - Previewing & Loading Revit Families

By John Flanagan

Introduction

Revit comes stocked with a lot of components in the Metric Library e.g. doors, windows, furniture, planting etc. You can preview components in the Type Selector to see what families are in the project. For example, if you click the door tab on the Architectural Ribbon and then click the drop down menu in the Type Selector at the top of the properties palette, you can preview the pre-loaded doors in a standard Revit Template file (fig 1).

Load Door Families

To load more door families from Revit’s metric library we can either click the load family button which is available when doors are selected, or we can click the insert tab and load families from there.

Previewing Door Families in the Metric Library

Having accessed the Metric library, open the door folder and you will see a list of all the different types that are available. You can single click on any door title and it will preview in the top right of the dialogue box (fig 3).

Hold the control key and select the doors that you want to load into your project. Once you have made your selection click open. Next expand families in your project browser. Open the door category and you will see that your new door types have been loaded into your project. Don’t be tempted to load all of the doors as this will overload the project and slow things down. Remember also that you can purge unused families from the manage tab on the ribbon.

Tip:  Previewing Door Families in the Metric Library

Hover over one of the listed door icons, hold down the control key and roll the mouse wheel forward. This allows you to get a quick preview of any of the content available to you (fig 4). Scroll back out again and the previews revert to icons again.

Conclusion

Component families such as windows and doors are inserted into projects unlike walls and floors which are already in the project. Walls and floors are known as system families and they act as hosts to inserted component families. A wall will act as a host to windows and doors. You cannot place a door or window in open space.