One topic Shawn spent some time on is Shared Parameters. Chapter 10, from my Interior Design using Autodesk Revit 2018 textbook, has a section dedicated to Shared Parameters.
In a slightly different fashion, from what Shawn presented, I will show a few powerful features from CTC's Shared Parameter Manager, a tool from their Revit add-in BIM Manager Suite.
When the tool is open, the left side looks similar to the Shared Parameters dialog from Revit. You can Open or create a New shared parameter file. For this example I will start a new file...
A feature I did not know about until today is the ability to automatically create Groups (for the SP file) based on Revit Categories (one valid way in which to organize your SPs). See iamge below.
Notice, in the next image, the groups have been created on the left. Another cool feature is the ability to Batch Add parameters with the same settings, a big time saver.
Nothing is saved until you click Save.
Here is where things get a little scary...
In Revit's Shared Parameters dialog, you can select an existing SP and click Properties to review it's settings. With CTC's tool you can click Modify, to... well, as it says, modify the SP.
There is a good reason this is called a BIM 'Manager' tool! However, if you know what you are doing, why should you have to leave Revit and manually edit a text file.
Changing the Name, Group, Discipline or Parameter Type will create a new GUID as stated below. The old SP is technically deleted.
Here is the result in the newly created TXT file.
From here you can swap out all the old parameters with CTC's Revit Family Processor. It does everything except labels in tags based on my experience.
Proceed with caution:)
