Friday, March 5, 2010

As Useful as the Nightlight on my HP

A huge difference between AutoCAD and Revit is the emphasis on learning keyboard shortcuts. When learning AutoCAD it is imperative to learn the shortcuts to speed up your work. In Revit, there is much less emphasis on learning them and I'm not sure why that is. There are a few I use constantly and they definitely speed things up. So at the risk of getting my AutoCAD and my Revit key commands further confused, I'm attempting to use use them more often in Revit. 

The few that I utilize all the time and recommend memorizing are:
  • VG Visibility/Graphics menu
  • VP Visual Properties menu
  • When in 3D View, hit F8 to enter the Rotate/Zoom/Pan command (also known as the Dynamic View box)
  • The arrow keys are nudge tools. The further you are zoomed in the smaller the increment will be that the object moves
  • Hitting the ESC key will generally get you out of any command
  • Using the scroll on the three-button mouse will allow you to zoom in and out. Hitting the scroll button will activate the Pan command
  • CTRL Select multiple elements
  • TAB Cycle through the prehighlighting of elements to select among ones that are close to one another
  • When box selecting, if you drag left to right it selects only those elements entirely within the rectangle; if you drag right to left it selects elements that cross the rectangle as well
  • When entering a number in feet and inches, type the feet then a space then the inches. No need to put ' and "
Some I've looked up and am trying to use more often:
  • CO copy (Cntrl-C)
  • RO rotate
  • AR array
  • MM mirror
  • PR properties
  • DI dimension
  • AL align
  • WA wall
  • WN window
  • DR door
  • CM component
  • RP ref plane
  • Alt+Enter to edit the Element properties of almost everything
Of course, there are more than this. Quite a few zoom commands like in AutoCAD, but in Revit if you have the three-button mouse I find those to be about as useful as the nightlight on my HP. Completely pointless. 

1 comment:

  1. one of the nice things about Revit is the ability to customize the keyboard shortcuts, which often to change from release year to release year. check out the keyboardshortcuts.txt file in the revit program folder.

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