Setting up an Autodesk® Revit® Door Schedule

Introduction

In our article 9 Revit® tips & tricks for structuring and organizing openings , we touched on important considerations for setting up your door families to make sure that they are ready to be used in your projects. In this article we will step through the basics of creating a door schedule once you are finished with design. The door schedule should be easy to read. It should contain relevant information for contractors to be able to use in conjunction with floor plans and separately provided specification documentation. This will allow them to uniquely identify, locate and understand what door hardware is to be applied to doors in a project during the construction process. Door schedules are also accompanied by door and frame elevations, and are printed together on designated sheets in the architectural progress set. 

Setting up a door schedule 

Setting up a door schedule in Revit is simple.

1. Navigate to the View Tab, click on Schedules and select Schedules/Quantities. This will open up a new window where you will be able to select the category to create a schedule.

2. Choose Doors, make your selections and click OK to be taken to the Schedule Properties window of your new Door Schedule.

The first thing you'll have to do is add parameters to the schedule. If you already set up your door families with standardized parameters, it's just as simple as selecting the parameters that you would like to populate your schedule.

3. Use the list on the left hand side in the Schedule Properties prompt and move them to the list of Scheduled Fields. Make sure to also select Include elements in links if you work with linked models in order for the door schedule.

We have some recommendations on what information to include in a schedule in this article.

Additional Options

Once you have created the door schedule there are plenty of other options that you may want to explore, depending on the setup of the project. The Filter tab gives you the ability to parametrically customize what doors appear on the schedule. This feature is especially useful for larger multilevel projects where a schedule can be set to list openings on a floor-by-floor basis. 

Certain kinds of projects like large Multi-Family Residential buildings usually involve modelling and placement of large quantities of identical doors. This can be done in several ways. A common method is to place groups of elements instead of manually repeating design by individually placing elements. This could lead to very long and cumbersome door schedules. Alternatively, the Sorting/Grouping tab provides useful features that allow you to group similar openings on select parameter values instead of showing every individual instance. By combining the filtering and grouping features you can, for example, create a separate door schedule for your typical openings.

Styling your door schedule

The Formatting tab allows for basic styling operations such as header names, text orientation and formatting. In addition to basic styling, Revit also allows you to customize the overall layout of your door schedule.

You can also group your door schedule fields and enter a new header to better organize your information. To do so, highlight and drag your mouse cursor over the headers that you would like to group and then click on the Group button. A new header row will appear above the selected fields where you can enter a new value for your grouping. This is commonly used to group door material & type and frame material & type.

Putting the door schedule on your sheets

Once you have completed setting up your door schedule(s) you can drag and drop it from your list of objects in the Project Browser.

If your door schedule doesn't fit on your sheet you can split it in two by clicking the "circular arrows" icon on the middle right-hand side of the door schedule. This creates two equally dimensioned tables from the original schedule and puts them side by side.

If the schedule(s) still don't fit on the sheet, you can try creating multiple schedules using appropriate filtering criteria, then placing them on separate sheets.

We have presented some simple guidelines for setting up a door schedule in Revit. Door schedules can vary in looks and complexity depending on your unique project requirements. As a rule, start with a good foundation in standardized and consistent door families that contain consistent and relevant parameters. Having a strong door family setup facilitates the process of not only building the door schedule but also facilitates the door hardware specification process with accurate and detailed door hardware specifications.

For more information, contact a consultant.