Revit Tip – Organising the Revit Project Browser – Part 1

By Dennis Collin

When working on Revit projects I always stress the importance of naming conventions and keeping the project and families in good order. A key indicator of a project’s setup is the appearance of the project browser. This list of families should be clearly named and organised so that information can be quickly viewed and checked.

This browser organisation is one of the tasks that needs to be done within any project template, along with title sheets, tags, families, symbols etc. Revit does provide some templates out of the box, and although useful they do need a fair bit of work for maximum efficiency. For example, the default sorting method of views within the Project Browser is by name, where it sorts views in an alphanumeric order. This method is not ideal because when the views are named according to floor location the ascending or descending listing of views is not as expected or desired. Whilst this can be corrected with a numerical prefix, this tends to go against BIM naming conventions, and does not work well should a project have several sub-basement levels because Revit does not count negative integers correctly.

A more effective sorting method therefore is to organise the views by level position, I am surprised this is not set as a default setting. To achieve this right-click on the views(all) section of the project browser environment and choose Browser Organisation.

On the Views tab, click new and define a new set of organisational rules for views. These will be sorted by Associated Level and grouped by Family and Type properties.

This new rule set need to be ticked as current for it to take effect in the project. Schedules and Sheets can be arranged in a similar way.

On the image above you may have noticed that the Site Plan has been placed into a different sub-heading. There are in fact many ways of doing this, but it is desirable when there may be many different plan view types, floor finishes, site, and general arrangement etc. This process and its options I will cover in a future post.