Saturday, October 01, 2011

Can't Drop CFM from CFM Tags

My Friend Doug Bowers had an interesting problem today. He sent me this email.


I have a schedule in which I do not want the CFM to show as text in the
schedule (I just want the numeric value).  I figured that was easy enough to
do by just going into the schedule properties and changing the formatting
for that field.  I selected the desired field, picked the Field Format
button, removed the checkmark for "Use project settings", and then changed
the "Unit symbol" from "CFM" to "None".  It gave me an "Invalid Input" error
message and wouldn't allow the change.

I thought that was interesting, so I went in the Project Units for the
project itself and tried to change the HVAC Airflow units from CFM to
something else.  Not only would Revit not let me change it to something
else, but if I just picked the OK button without changing anything it gave
me the same error message.



Here is the secret. Go into project units as Doug suggested and pick CFM, but this time first change the Rounding to anything but Custom first. Everything works as expected after that. For some crazy reason Custom is the default and it hasn't worked since at least 2010.




My suggestion is change it in your template and forget about it.

5 comments:

Alan J. said...

You can override it at the a schedule level also and i would recommend it over a global project units setting.

Todd M Shackelford said...

Good point. I override it globally because I never want to see it. Specifically tags. know what you want, then fix it as required.

Gabe Cottam said...

I am curious as to how you override it at the schedule level. I have not found that option yet. I have always been able to edit the parameter's unit format on my tags (in the tag family itself) to drop the units regardless of the project units settings.

One trick I've employed for dropping units from schedules is to create a calculated value that is an integer and divide your original parameter by 1 "unit" to get a number with the units striped out.
(ex. new parameter "Unitless Flow" = "Flow" / 1 CFM)

I have not been able to edit the parameter's unit format directly however.

David Butts said...

on the schedule - go to the format tab - pick the parameter you want to remove the text from (i.e. airflow) - open field format. Uncheck use project settings, then set the unit symbol to none.

That'll tell the CFM text not to show up in the schedule.

Todd M Shackelford said...

Sweet! David saves the day again.