Export Furniture Schedule Data from Revit

So, for a first go, teach myself effort I’ve attempted to export data from a Revit furniture schedule into Excel. We use an Access DB to prepare Furniture Spec’s and we use the Revit schedule to gather basic “inventory” information from the model: Type Mark (renamed to ItemCode), Room Name, and Room Number. I’ve stumbled my way into a solution that works (more-or-less) and would appreciate any review/comment from the experts. I should note that I had to cobble together an “Elements in Room” node as it came up unsupported after the 8.0 upgrade. There are a few issues - this solution doesn’t appear to recognize and exclude Design Options in the model and for some reason it appears to have issues with Furniture items that are wall-hosted.

And this brings me to the big question. Since the data is already formatted exactly the way we need it in a Schedule, couldn’t someone develop a process that “gathers” data from a Revit Schedule and brings it in to Dynamo?

Appreciate any, all help and my apologies if I’m going over ground that’s been well covered. I’m just starting to get my feet wet here.

wwm

Bill,

If your schedule is already containing all of the great information that you need, why not just use the Export>Reports functionality of Revit to move this data to Excel? I hate to be a party pooper but I always recommend to use the right tool for the job over forcing the issue/reinventing the wheel.

Of course, if you are doing something else to it, in Dynamo before exporting to Excel then, yes it’s a valid question. But, from what I gather from your question you are not doing anything that Revit can’t already do.

Good luck!

Ps. Yes, its possible to read schedule data.

Konrad,

Everything you say is true. I set myself this task mostly as a training exercise but also because I thought we could benefit from “automating” the export process. Since we haven’t put any of the relevant Apps into play across the board, our process involves exporting to .txt, then bringing that text data into an Excel file, making sure all is formatted correctly, then overwriting the file that is linked to the db. It’s fairly common for some of our users to make a mistake along the way.

wwm