Setting up Room Schedules in Revit

Rooms and Tagging:

Rooms are special objects in Revit because they do not have some sort of a clear physical representation similar to other model elements like walls, furniture, and doors.  They are however just as much as part of your model.  Their horizontal extents are determined by “Bounding Elements” in the form of walls, doors, columns, or actual room separation lines.  All of these objects allow Revit to determine the area of each room.  Additionally, it is possible with Revit to calculate the volume of each room.  These settings are accessible on the Room & Area panel under the home tab.

Rooms & Room Tags:
The room is the spatial object that contains all the metadata about the space.  The tag merely reports those values.  In many cases you can change the values in the room tag, and the room properties will update (and vice versa).  But whereas deleting the room will delete the tag, the opposite is not true.  You can delete a room tag, and the room will remain.  This makes sense because the room may not be tagged in all views.


Adding Rooms to a Project:
Adding Rooms is a simple process.  Just go to the plan view and hover over enclosed spaces.  The room boundary highlights, indicating the space in which you’re about to place a room object.  You don’t have to tag rooms as you place them, but by default this option is selected.  In the type selector, you can select to apply a “Tag Only”, Tag by Area, or “Tag with Volume”.


Creating a Room Schedule:
Once Rooms are created it is a simple process to create a schedule that can be used to list off all the rooms in the project.  Simply go to the view menu and under the Create panel push the Schedules button. This will bring up a dialogue box titled “New Schedule”.  In this box select the “Rooms” category.  Once selected, it will open up another box titled “Schedule Properties.”  Select number, name and area from the available fields list on the left hand side and add them to the Scheduled Fields list on the right.   Once you push OK here, it will display your schedule, with all the rooms in a new view.  It is located in the Project Browser under schedules.

Deleting Rooms:

As said previously, it is possible to delete a room tag without deleting the room.  This is simply done by selecting the room tag and pressing the delete key.  The room remains although it may not be visible.  You can find rooms without tags by moving your mouse around in a space.  The reference will highlight with lines crossing through the space when your mouse pointer is over one of them.

Deleting rooms themselves takes multiple steps.  If you highlight and delete a room object in a floor plan view, the definition of the room remains in your project until you either place another room using the same definition or actually delete it in a room schedule.  When you do this, a warning box appears in the lower right corner of the screen stating: “A Room was deleted from all model views but still remains in this project.  The room can be removed from any schedule or placed back in the model using the Room command.”  To delete the room completely from the project, highlight the row in the schedule, and right click to delete the row.  If you deleted the room in plan, it will show up in the schedule with the words “Not Placed” under the area column.  In the Properties box, you can pick the filters to sort the rooms to make a selection quicker if there are multiple rooms needing to be removed.  When working on a project, always create a Room Schedule that you can use to modify data about the rooms.

Room Renumbering:
Out of the box, Revit doesn't have a room renumbering tool.  You are required to manually go in and renumber each and every room individually.  This can be problematic and time consuming if you have a large building with multiple floors.  

Going out on the Internet to the Revit Autodesk Exchange, I typed in renumbering into the search bar and was able to find some free tools from CTC BIM Project Suite for Revit 2014.  Included in this package is a room renumbering tool.  Simply click in each room in your project and it will renumber the room accordingly.