Organize Frequently Used Families

Okay, so you use Revit of some flavor. No doubt you use families. No doubt you load them over and over and over. If you use a family with a catalog, you load that family repeatedly as you load additional types. Here's a tip to perhaps make your life a little easier.

1) In your My Documents folder, create a folder called whatever, "RST2010 Family Favs" perhaps.

2) From within Revit, open any File access dialog (like Open) and browse to My Documents. Click and drag the "RST2010 Family Favs" folder onto the Places area of the File access dialog.

3) When you close this dialog, Revit will ask if you want to save the changes to the Places list - do so.

Now go about your work. Next time you go to access a family you use a lot,

a) Right-click on it and choose Copy.

b) Then move to the Places list and click on that "fav" folder. In the "fav" folder, right-click and choose Paste Shortcut.

Now you can just click the shortcut link and Revit will follow it and load the family file. If applicable it will open up the catalog as well.

Now the beauty of this is that the file organization for Revit families is quite complicated, files are all over the place - even those related to one another. You could take this a step further and make folders for specific project types (perhaps a Precast building folder) and put shortcut links to frequently used families that all related to that building type. By being a shortcut, you maintain your standard family organization and as Autodesk updates the family files, the links you created stay valid (as long as the name and location is the same).

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