Tutorial – Creating and Controlling General Notes in Revit

It is a well known fact that large blocks of text can become very unwieldy within Revit, especially when a small tweak is needed to reformat the text or making a simple width adjustment. A better method is to use a Revit schedule to prepare and control large blocks of text.

General Notes within Revit

This gives you the advantage of being able to resize and split blocks of text into separate columns which is really useful. So how does it all work?

1. The first step is to make sure that you have all your required standard notes saved in a product such as Microsoft Word or simply Notepad. You can then copy and paste each paragraph of text as required.

2. Create a Revit schedule and choose a category that you are not likely to use in Structural drafting such as the Casework Category. Make sure that you select Schedule keys and give the schedule the relevant title, in this example ‘Foundation Notes’.

New Schedule for General Notes

3. In the Fields Tab make sure that you add the comments field. This will later be used for your notes whilst the Key Name is used for the numbering or lettering as shown below.

Shedule Fields

4.  On the Appearance tab you can remove the Grid lines and the headers and also configure your desired text fonts and text sizes. Click OK to the dialog box.

Schedule Appearance

5. You will now see the schedule in Revit, you will need to add a new row of data to start the schedule. Right click over the Foundation Notes heading and choose New Row as show below.

Revit Schedule - Creating a new row

You can now start to Copy and Paste your paragraphs into the schedule. For each new paragraph you will need to add a new row.

6. You can now drag the notes from the Schedules/Quantities to your drawing sheet and the select the block of text and use the grips to manipulate the column widths and split the schedule into two elements if required.

Revit - Drag Schedule into Drawing Sheet

You can of course use the same notes on multiple sheets and store these within your template for fast and efficient note creation. This will greatly simplify the creation and control of large blocks of text.

Hope that helps,