AS319456 6

Revit Dashboards the Cheap and Easy Way

Jason Kunkel
CADD Microsystems

Learning Objectives
• Understand what data is good for long term tracking
• Discover how to use the Model Checker for Revit to collect your dashboard data
• Learn how a tool like Power BI can be built into a Revit dashboard
• Gain insight to leverage and adapt this process for your own needs

Description
Having a dashboard for your Revit model is a great way to monitor trends, watch out for issues,
and share insights about the model file with everyone in an easy to consume graphical format.
In the past, dashboards were something only the big firms with the big staffs were able to create
and manage. But with some free and pretty cheap tools available now, anyone can collect and
share the data needed for a slick dashboard that you can share with your team. This session
will cover using the Model Checker for Revit to build and generate a report that can be used to
monitor model fidelity in a data visualization tool like Power BI and will discuss some best
practices around that process.

Speaker
Jason has worked across the design and technology spectrum of
the AEC industry for over 20 years. After graduating from the
University of Virginia School of Architecture, he began his career
as an architectural designer for a major mid-Atlantic architecture
firm specializing in large, public sector projects.

Discovering a passion and knack for technology, he migrated to

the IT support world, spending over a decade as the Director of
Information Technology, where he applied that passion to help
architects and engineers leverage technology in new and exciting
ways, and save time in the process.

Working at CADD Microsystems, Jason has been able to apply his knowledge and experience
to help a wider range of customers achieve the same goals. He is one of the founders of
RevitRVA, a Revit user group in the central Virginia area, and has a wide array of knowledge
and experience with both software and hardware to help companies improve their processes
and work more effectively. He also finds it very odd to write in the third person, like Gollum.

Page 1
Data, Dashboards, and Revit
Data gets generated at an astonishing rate. Filtering through white noise to essential data that is
important has become its own industry, with its own tools, buzzwords, and processes.

A popular outcome of this new data world is what’s know as a dashboard. The purpose of a
data dashboard is essentially what the purpose of a traditional mechanical dashboard is – a
series of quick visual indicators giving me a snapshot of important information.

There are three main types of data that can be collected for a design project:

Design information and requirements

Design information includes things like design area vs. program area, code
requirements around equipment counts, etc. This information is useful for PMs
(Project Managers) to make sure the design is progressing along as expected
and is meeting the project scope.

Project data
Information such as timeline and schedule, budget information, and staffing
numbers can be organized and displayed in a dashboard and is often used by
PMs and PICs (Principals in Charge).

Model integrity
Related specifically to a Revit model, this information includes what kind of
elements are being used and how they are being used as these can impact the
performance of the model. This kind of information is critical to BIM Managers
and Model Managers.

A Model Integrity, or “Health” dashboard is what we will be building.

Page 2
Let’s make a dashboard
This handout walks through the steps needed for a simple health dashboard example. The goal
is to give you an understanding of the concepts and overall workflow. You can use the
dashboard we make here in production, you can use the other example provided in the extra
resources section, or you can adapt what you find here for your specific needs.

What you need

As we are targeting “cheap”, and not free, this process is designed around tools and software
that we see many firms already have access to or can acquire easily.

Revit – it’s in the title of this class. Hopefully this one doesn’t come as a surprise.

Autodesk Model Checker for Revit – the Autodesk Model Checker is a free add-in that
collects information on elements and parameters in your model and generates a report on them.
This report can contain criteria for pass/fail results or count and report elements. Since our
dashboard wants numbers of things our checks will all target counts of matching elements.

Model Checker Configurator – this free utility is the cousin to the Model Checker. It is used to
create custom checkset that you run against your model.

Power BI Desktop – Power BI is Microsoft’s data visualization software. This version of the is
free for anyone to use. There are paid tiers with more functionality, but they are not needed for
this process. There are many other tools from other software manufacturers, each with similar
functionality.

Overall workflow
This is the basic outline of creating your first model health dashboard. The good news is that
many of these steps are one-time only if you are happy with your results. Any changes or
modifications to the data collected, or the format of the Excel report will need a redo of the later
steps, so it is recommended that you don’t change your dashboard during your project, as part
of the benefit is to start to get an understanding of the data overtime, and visually it helps if the
format of that data isn’t changing all the time.

We will dive into each of these steps in detail:

1. Identify what data to track

2. Create a Model Checker checkset

3. Run checkset on our model and export Model Checker report to Excel

4. Make Power BI report

5. Share and update Power BI report

Page 3
1. Identify what data to track

Criteria
There are five important criteria to think about when you decide what to track:

Quantifiable – basically can it be counted? While a data visualization is

usually displayed in rounded numbers to make it easier to read, you must start
with an actual number.

Trackable – is the information held in the Revit model? Something like number
of elements is obviously in the Revit model. That may be too high level, so
narrowing that down to different kinds of elements you want to track is a great
way to identify data as well.

Changes over time – will the information evolve based on the project phase,
or is it going to be different between the models I am looking at. On a typical
Revit project, you will determine the number of RVT files at the start of the
project. Normally this isn’t going to change so it’s not a good contender to track.

Impact model performance – will too many or too few of these items make my
Revit model sad? This is almost cart before the horse, but through experience,
you have a good idea of what may impact your model’s health, although you’ve
probably never tracked it before.

Worthwhile beyond the project – can we make things better by monitoring

this? Is there something we can learn from this, or is it something we can teach
other to do better with the information? This isn’t the highest priority, but it’s
one to always keep in the back of your head.

Potential Data to Track

Based on the above criteria, here are some good candidates to build into our dashboard:

• File size
• Number of warnings
• Number of elements
• Linked files
• Number of views
• Model groups used
• Detail groups used
• Number of in-place families
• Purgeable elements

Page 4
Through experience of working with keeping models happy and healthy over the years,
you probably already have a checklist of items that you watch out for when you do a
model check-up, so the above list are probably things you are already thinking of, and
each one is a great candidate.

For our example, let’s narrow this list down to something a little easier to build:

• File size – this is simply a great piece of information to know especially when
comparing to other metrics. We would expect an 800MB model to have more
Warnings than a 50MB model.

• Number of warnings – one of the first things we learn about keeping a Revit
model healthy is to keep the number of warnings as low as possible. And with the
Warnings dialog so small, this is one that can get overlooked easily as well.

• Detail groups used – this is a bit of a personal vendetta with me. I hate detail
groups. Detail groups have murdered models that I worked on. I’m like a detail
group vigilante.

• Number of in-place families – it’s great that your users know how to model from
scratch in Revit, but in-place families should be used very infrequently. Knowing
how many are in our model is a great way to find educational opportunities for
the production teams.

Page 5
2. Create a Model Checker checkset
Now that we know what data we are interested in, let’s build a Model Checker checkset to
collect our data. While this handout doesn’t cover in detail how to use the Model Checker of the
Model Checker Configurator, the Extra resources section at the end has links to where you can
find more information on each.

A Model Checker checkset is an XML file that holds individual checks that can be run
in the Model Checker against your RVT file.

Create and configure a new checkset

Opening the Model Checker Configurator starts us off with a blank checkset. First, setup
the General Settings and save it.

• Title is required, but other fields in General Settings are not.

• Since this is for a dashboard, it is recommended to set Do not use
required/optional for this checkset.
Once we have the General Settings done, let’s be sure to save it.

Page 6
Create checks
Instead of reinventing the wheel, it just so happens that the data we are looking for
already exists in already made checksets or can be easily added as a Pre-Built check.

Using Pre-Built Checks

File Size and Warning Count can be accessed in the Pre-built checks section. In the
list, find each, click Configure, then click Add.

Note that this is adding the individual checks to the Unused Checks list, we will format
the structure after we have created all our checks.

Copying already created Advanced checks

The remaining two pieces of data we want to track, Detail Groups and In-place
Families, also have already been made. They are Advanced checks and are
constructed by a series of filters that query the Revit database and report what is
needed.

In the Model Checker Public Library, there are a series of checksets that are publicly
available for anyone to grab and use. Some are specifically built for individual publicly
available BIM standards, and some are general checksets that demonstrate the
capabilities in the Model Checker. If we look for the Best Practices checksets, we can
find the two checks we want already made.

Page 7
There are two ways to copy an existing check. The first method is to simply open a
second instance of the Configurator, open the individual check, and match all the
settings in a blank Advanced check in the dashboard checkset.

• The check Name is what we are looking for in Power BI

• Pay specific attention to the Check Result. For our dashboard, this is almost
always Count or Matching Elements Only, as all we are concerned with is a
number to track.
• Description is not needed but can be helpful if you need to go back and tweak
your checkset.
• Matching the Filters is essential, or you may end up with an incorrect count.
Once have setup your check, click Add/Save to put it in the Unused Checks section.
Then click New to start your next check.

The second way to get already created checks into your checkset file is by copying them
through a text editor. The checkset files are XML, and with some patience you can open
an already created XML, copy the check, and paste it into your XML. Additional
resources has a link to a blogpost covering this in detail.

Page 8
Structure the checkset
On the Structure tab, we find our previously created checks in the Unused Checks
portal. It is just a matter of adding a heading and section, then dragging and dropping
our checks under that section.

The name of the heading and section are not critical here, but again, keeping things
short and sweet make it easier to update it later.

When done, the Checkset Structure should look something like this:

Be sure to save your checkset file and close the Configurator.

Page 9
Run checkset on our model / export Model Checker report to Excel
Running the checkset on our Revit model is straightforward. Below are the basic steps and
some specific notes when you are running checks for a dashboard.

1. Open your Revit model

2. On the BIM Interoperability Tools tab, select Model Checker > Setup.

3. Open your dashboard checkset XML file. Do not uncheck any checks. Click Save and
Close.

4. Model Checker > Run.

5. Select Run Report. Watch the exciting progress bar.

6. Once completed, the report will open up. Click Excel to export the report.

7. In the Export to Excel dialog, select the path and name for your Excel file. This is the
location and file that we will be reading into our Power BI dashboard.

8. Be sure the Export list elements checkbox is NOT checked. This will just make your
Excel file larger with no benefit.

9. Click OK to save the Excel file.

Page 10
Make Power BI report
Using the just exported Excel file, we are going to query the data in Power BI and “transform” it,
making it easier to build reports.

This is just scratching the surface of using Power BI, and frankly, may not be the best
way to handle some tasks in it. If you have access to a Power BI expert, make that
person your best friend and leverage them to make your work more efficient.

Attach the data source

In Power BI, you can attach to a single Excel file or a folder where you will house
multiple Excel files (among other data sources).

A single file gives you a snapshot of the health of a single model at a single point in time.
A folder collection of Excel reports can give you a trend report over time. Each will
impact how you transform your data and what kinds of visualizations you make, so figure
this out ahead of time.

For this example, we will be attaching to a single Excel file and making a single model
snapshot dashboard.

1. Launch Power BI Desktop

2. Save your Power BI report file somewhere (yes, it’s blank, but, you know…)

3. Click Get Data

4. Select Excel as the source and open the exported report Excel file

(continued next page…)

Page 11
 5. Power BI will open a dialog box where you can select Excel tables, or sheets as
the data source

Select Checks and confirm the data looks like the tab we want

6. Click Transform Data to open the Query Editor

The Power Query Editor could use its own 8-hours class. If you have some experience
in SQL or queries in Excel, that will help. We will target some of the steps and tips for
this specific dashboard. More advanced data transformations are needed for
dashboards that review multiple reports.

Page 12
 Working in the Power Query Editor

A. The data source that we specified when we loaded the Excel file

B. The transformed data that will be available in Power BI

C. A history of transformations. This is very convenient that lets you “Rewind” any work
you did if you need to backtrack. Note that the Power Query Editor takes some initial
assumed steps on its own to pre the data

Data transformation
Power BI wants to visualize data from Fields, which are basically columns. The Model
Checker has exported the data we want as rows, as well as a lot more data that we just
don’t care about right now. So, we need to transform the data. Luckily, once we go
through this step, any new Excel file that we use to update our dashboard will use the
same transformation rules.

The need to maintain consistent transformations to the data is one of the reasons to
not tweak or change your checkset XML that you are generating reports from. This
build consistency throughout the life of the project as you are reviewing data.

The following transformations are applied to the query to “clean it up”, in this specific
order – remember that the steps build on each other, so doing them in a different order
will give you different results:

Remove unwanted columns – right-click on the columns and select Remove. This is
just to help us focus on what we know we need to focus on at this point.

Page 13
Once finished, our data looks like this:

Remove “MB” from the size result – we want to get down to two columns: Name and
Results, and we want them to be numbers for our visualization to work properly. Count is
already set as a number (see the 123 in the corner), but Result Message is currently
seen as text. But the first thing we need to do, is make sure it is only a number.

Right-click on the column and select Replace Values. This will give us what is essentially
a Find/Replace and we will find “ MB” (make sure to have the space) and replace it with
nothing.

Our data now looks like this:

Change the file size to a number – right now it’s text (note the ABC in the corner of the
header). Before we move the data to the Count column, we should make it a number
otherwise we might change the Count column to text.

Right-click on the column and select Change Type -> Whole Number.

Page 14
Note that this also rounds the value. For our dashboard, this is fine. We are looking for
data that we can glance at and tell a story. Minutiae around fractions of a MB is not
something we need to trouble ourselves with.

Merged the data from the Result Message and Count columns – Power BI is going
to be much happier if it has fewer data elements to worry about. And since we know that
the Result Message column has the File Size data and it always will, and the Count
column has the rest, we need to somehow merge the two based on some easy rules.

Again, understanding this is not a Power BI course, some Googling and trial and error
can provide a solution that does the following:

Create a Conditional Column that will use the Count value if Result Message is null or
will use the Result Message value if Count is 0.

The dialog to set that up looks like this:

And our resulting data looks like this:

Page 15
Hide the columns we don’t need – another right-click and Remove will clean it up a
little more:

Pivot the data – we have all the data we want, but Power BI will read the columns as
the fields. This is a surprisingly easy step. Highlight the Name column and click Pivot
Column in the ribbon. Power BI will ask you what the Values column is. You get only one
choice – “Result” – select that one and click OK.

Our data is now rotated:

Align the data types – for some reason, Power Query Editor decided to change our
data types or Any after the pivot, so we need to select each column and set it back to
Whole Number. And that is indicated by the 123 in the header corner.

Close the Query Editor – now that our data is nice and clean, click Close & Apply in the
ribbon and the Query Editor will save our changes and send us back to Power BI.

To verify all is good, we can look in the Fields column and see our four pieces of data
sitting there waiting for us.

Page 16
Lay out your report
Now that the heavy data lifting is done, we can actually create our report.

Power BI is NOT a desktop publishing application, so take baby steps and be patient.
You have a limited set of fonts, aligning elements is peculiar, there are no good
shortcuts to match styles, etc. But with some patience you can get a dashboard that
looks nice and more importantly conveys the data you want it to convey.

If you want to change the aspect ratio, or the background color/image before you start,
make sure nothing is selected, then click the Format (roller brush) on the Visualizations
panel. When nothing is selected, the setting on the Format page are for the report
overall.

By now we should have a general idea of how we want to display the data, and that
comes by means of adding a visualization and assigning a field to it.

Creating a visualization
Adding a visualization is simply a matter of finding the one we want in the Visualizations
panel and clicking on it. Power BI will place it on our report, waiting for a data field.

To assign a data field to it, we can drag and drop the field from the Fields panel over top
of the visualization itself, or on top of the bar “Add data fields here” in the Visualization
property window.

Modifying your visualization size can be done via dragging the grips, or by opening the
Format panel. The Format panel also has many other settings for color, font size,
heading, etc.

Adding new visualization styles

Power BI has a handful of visualization styles, but there are other community made ones
that you can find and import.

You can track them down on the Internet, and then click … in the Visualization panel to
import a visualization. Select the file you downloaded, and it will be available to that
report.

Visual settings vary depending on the custom visualization you selected, so you’ll need
to do some experimenting to find the one you like.

For the sample, we’ve grabbed a nice tachometer dial to give us a threshold setting of
when things are not the way we want them to be in our model.

Page 17
Share Power BI report
How you are going to share your report depends heavily on who is going to use it. This specific
workflow targets Power BI, but if you use a different piece of software for data visualization, that
will also impact how you share the information.

Export your report

• Publish to Web - If you have access to the Pro (rmeaning: “paid”) version of
Power BI, you can publish your reports to the web, and get a link to share with
anyone.

• Print - In the Power BI Desktop application, you can easily print your report. This
lets you leverage any installed printer you might have, letting you create a PDF,
PNG, or even actual paper.

• Screenshot - We have leveraged using SnagIt or the Snip & Sketch tool in
Windows to create a static image of reports for review.

Review your report

Being consistent in monitoring and taking action against your report is critical. Be sure to
get your exported report in front of team members that need the information. This might
mean creating different reports for different sets of eyes, but once you create your first,
it’s easier each time to modify and make others.

Some methods we have identified to get the report in front of the correct people:

• Review it during your weekly/bi-weekly project review meetings

• Embed an image in your Revit startup page. You will need to write a simple
macro or add-in that will automatically refresh images on project start.

• Use a third-party tool such as the CADD Microsystems Dashboard and make the
report the start page for your users.

Update your report

Just as important as reviewing your report in a timely fashion is updating it. Give yourself
a realistic schedule and stick to it. Once you have transformed your data once, you don’t
need to do it again, so creating an updated version of the report should be a
straightforward process, and one that gets added to a BIM Manager or Model Manager’s
regular to-do list.

Page 18
Additional resources
Autodesk Model Checker Sample Dashboard

https://www.biminteroperabilitytools.com/dashboard.zip

Revit Model Health Dashboard whitepaper

https://www.biminteroperabilitytools.com/downloads/ModelHealthDashboard.pdf

Autodesk Model Checker Help on AKN

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/community/collection/model-checker-for-revit

Autodesk Model Checker Configurator Help on AKN

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/community/collection/model-checker-configurator

Model Checker YouTube playlist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHNit7Zc87M&list=PL0RZIBv0pCftzo9ntWSwTfVbUE3d96e
tu

Model Checker Configurator YouTube playlist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMfIKlfIwUA&list=PL0RZIBv0pCfs3L_P0jVorPrb0yAeUTn9q

CADD Microsystem’s blog posts – Model Checker tips and tricks

https://www.caddmicrosystems.com/blog/2019/10/revit-model-checker-under-the-hood-ids-and-
text-editors/

https://www.caddmicrosystems.com/blog/2019/06/advanced-revit-model-check-part-1/

https://www.caddmicrosystems.com/blog/2019/07/advanced-revit-model-check-part-2/

https://www.caddmicrosystems.com/blog/2019/08/advanced-revit-model-check-part-3/

https://www.caddmicrosystems.com/blog/2019/10/revit-model-checker-under-the-hood-ids-and-
text-editors/

Page 19