Ideate BIMLink for Revit

As an old data hack from ages ago one of the prime gripes I've had with Revit, even from the early pre-Autodesk days was data manipulation without having to use Revit to access the data. Ideate BIMLink for Revit helps to solve part of that problem. First, getting the data out so you can work on it. Second, getting data back into Revit easily and reliably.

While this process is manual, it is easy and with a little planning and coordination you should now be able to extract data from Revit, change it, spell check it, even add new associated values and then reinsert the data. Of course all the editing is taking place in an outside application, MS Excel. Now I want to make this perfectly clear, as I said before this is a manual process and those can be easily messed up because of our human tendency to err. I would much rather see these extractions to a simple data manager that allows automatic updates for data changes in the external data application, that way everything is always up to snuff, so to say.

In the second part of the solution getting the data back into Revit is as simple as selecting the BIMLink addon in the Revit menu bar, select the spreadsheet file you want to load and then presto! the data is added. At least that's what they want you to believe, but you have to know that the data format have to match up with the data elements defined already in the model, but that should go without saying.

So in the end, even our most novice users can learn how to use this software and get some really needed extended value out of B<I>M and make everyone's life easier.