Linking the Structural Template

Before starting a new project lets go through some of the basic setting we need to change in order to get the most out of our Revit usage. The welcome screen provides you with options that can be customized to save you time when starting a new project. Under Projects on the left hand side there are the “Open” and “New” buttons as well as some preloaded templates. We can link our template to Revit and it will appear in this list.

 To Link the office template we will need to change the settings. To do this click on the “R” at the upper left hand corner. At the bottom of the drop down list click on the “Options” button. If you click on the “File Locations” tab on the left you will see the following menu. If you haven’t modified this section yet there will be 4 or 5 different templates linked to the preloaded files that come with Revit. I would delete all but the Structural Template using the Red minus button. The next step would be to link the file path to the office template stored on the server. You can also rename the Structural Template to say “APEX Template” to be more apparent. There are some other file locations that can be changed in this menu, but for now we will focus on the template.

General Notes Families

Some of the General Note Blocks can be edited or modified to meet the needs of the project. The Design Information block for instance has several editable functions. You can fill in all the design info that is project specific, and you can add additional floor load types in the properties menu.


The Special Inspection block can be modified for additional inspection types. Each block has an instance property called last block, that can be check to add a heavy line at the bottom to end the schedule.