by Chelsea Weibust
In my fifth year of architecture school I found myself working on a group project for my Professional Practice for Computer Applications class. I've never been one to get excited about group projects as it stresses me out and I usually find myself doing most of the work. Anyway, I digress.
For this group project, much of the work involved using the architecture computer program, Revit. This is a program that had been pushed on us since second semester of our sophomore years, so needless to say, we all knew the program pretty well - or so I thought.
Sitting in the computer lab next to one of my partners, I peaked over at his screen to remind him to add something to our building model and I found myself watching him work. To draw a wall he would drag his mouse up to the ribbon menu, find the home tab, click on the wall icon, and proceed to draw the wall. Then he went to add the windows. He repeated the process of navigating the ribbon menu to find all of these icons needed to add each element. I couldn't believe this was how he worked! I couldn't even imagine how time consuming it would be to have to go up to the ribbon and search for each icon every time to add another element to the drawing. It must have taken him 10 times longer to build his models!
After over 3 years of using this program he still hadn't learned the magic of shortcut keys. I decided (for both of our sakes) to sit with him for an hour or so to power through the world of commands and keyboard shortcuts and I could tell he was excited to be able to work much faster.
I couldn't imagine using computer programs without keyboard shortcuts and commands. It's imperative for productivity and your sanity! Imagine perfecting these commands and allowing yourself to get your work done in half the time! Efficiency is key.
I don't want you to drudge through the process of navigating the ribbon so here are 22 of my most used Revit keyboard shortcuts and how to use them! (see below for downloadable pdf of shortcuts)
Find the downloadable pdf here!
Did you just start using Revit, or have you been using it for a while? I’m willing to bet you’ve made some of these mistakes yourself at some point. These are some of the worst Revit mistakes I’ve seen in my years of teaching Revit and working with other designers. How many of these are you guilty of?