Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Hyperlink from Revit Starting View to Office Standards Manual

I have been implementing a few changes in the architectural office template for 2019, such as advanced materials. In the starting view, I added a way to quickly get to the firm Revit standards manual.
BTW, I previously wrote about Revit's starting view here: Revit Starting View and Titleblock Re-purposing
To facilitate staff having quick access to the firm standards for Revit I created a Generic Annotation family with a URL parameter that points to a local (i.e. on the firm's network) file rather than a web address. This family is simply placed next to the heading, shown below, and table of Contents in the starting view.


Additionally...

The workflow is pretty simple, click on the family and then click on the link in the Properties Palette. So, two clicks and the current PDF is open. Note that you only need to click where the "..." button is, even though you cannot see it. Usually, someone would click in the field to expose the "..." button but that is not actually required. This works for other things like materials as well!


Here is the parameter I created in the family. It is an instance parameter to make it easier to access. Again, notice how a path to a file, PDF in this case, is entered rather than a web site URL. This could also point to a SharePoint address as well.


Perhaps there is an even better way to achieve this... if you think so, I encourage you to comment below! I do not think scripting or Dynamo would help here as that would likely be more clicks and more complicated - as I think this workflow described is super simple.

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