Drafting Views: Saving individual views for reuse

There are many aspects of Revit that aid efficiency. One of these is the ability to use the same components, details, etc; on multiple projects. Let’s take Drafting Views for example.

You probably already know by now that Drafting Views are typically used for adding 2D construction / detail information to your project. Many “details” that you produce (or import) in a Drafting View would be applicable for use on other projects- for example a standard door threshold detail, or certain timber joinery details.

So what would be really neat is if we could save these individual Drafting Views (complete with all their text annotations, etc) as separate Revit files that we can then store in a Library and make available for future use.

Good News! Revit already has this feature available to you. Let’s take typical drafting view….

This one is a typical eaves detail. It could of course have been produced as a Detail Callout from a Section View. But with this project, I drew this out on a Drafting View. Now let’s say that I want to save this View in case I have similar projects in the future where I would want to use this again. All I need to do is right-click on the name of the drafting view (in the Project Browser window)...

And select “Save to New File”. Then just choose where you want to save it to and what you want to call it. I’m going to call this one “Eaves Detail” and save it to the Desktop...

This will then save a totally new Revit file that only contains the contents of our single Drafting view. OK, so that has saved our drafting view. But how do we get this into a new Project? All we need to do is (from our new project) select File > Insert from File > Views

When prompted, navigate your way to the location of the drafting view you wish to load (mine was on the Desktop) and select it. You will then be presented with the “Insert File” control panel…

The drafting view will be “checked” by default. Go ahead and hit OK. The drafting view will then be inserted into the current project...

Notice how it retains the same View name as it was in the original project- and has not named it according to the file name. The ability to save and reuse individual views in Revit is a really powerful feature. It allows you to quickly develop an “office standard library” of details that eradicates the need to repeatedly “reinvent the wheel”