Introducing the New Sheet Assistant for Revit

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Aligning views between multiple sheets and consistently placing new views on new sheets is an absolute pain when there are more than a few views involved. We need a better way to manage view position and placement across sheets. With Sheet Assistant, a new tool in BIM Project Suite, you can streamline your view placement + easily manage and configure your sheets.

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Pro Tip: Combine Sheet Assistant with the power of View Creator and Spreadsheet Link to accelerate your Revit workflows!

Accessing the Sheet Assistant

Sheet Assistant is available with the 2023 version (23.0) of BIM Project Suite and is compatible with Revit 2019-2023. To access the tool once downloaded, open Revit, navigate to your ribbon and then select the CTC Software tab. You will see a section called “CTC BIM Project Suite,” which is where you can select the Sheet Assistant tool.

Sheet Assistant Interface

Source: Load in a pre-saved configuration or a sheet that exists already in your project.
Destination: Use the ‘Target Sheets’ tab to apply view layouts based on a template, sheet, or configuration. If you need to define new sheets or new views on sheets, use the ‘New Sheet’ tab.

View Alignment

Manually aligning views on sheets is tedious, time-consuming, and doesn’t yield consistent results. There’s so much dragging and dropping, duplicating, renaming – and that process is even more of a pain if you’re working with a lot of views. Since the View Sheet Assistant window in Revit is modeless, it allows you to access and use Revit while the tool is still open.

To start using the tool, (Step 1) navigate to your chosen plan sheet under the ‘Sheet’ tab. If you already have views placed on your sheets, the preview window will detect those elements and provide the view name, type, and scale on hover. Before you set your view alignment method, (Step 2) select the view you want to adjust in the preview window. The selected view will highlight green. In this example, we are aligning our keynote legend. Once your view is selected, (Step 3) use the drop-down boxes below the preview window to set your alignment method. Next, (Step 4) select the sheets you’d like to change under the ‘Target Sheets’ tab, then use the (Step 5) ‘Select All’ button to the right to select all the views on those sheets. Click apply and watch your views align in a flash!

Pro Tip: Since the Sheet Assistant grabs the outer boundaries of views, inconsistent annotation positioning can become a problem. To make your view edges significantly more consistent, we recommend using scope boxes and annotation crop boundaries, especially in plan views and elevation/section views.

Sheet Creation and View Placement

Next, we’ll use this tool for the process of sheet creation and placing new views on sheets. Say you need to create lighting plans for your electrical layout. First, go to the ‘New Sheet’ tab in the Sheet Assistant tool. Here, you can select existing sheets and views or create new ones. If you select existing, you can choose to duplicate sources, which allows you to assign a suffix, select a view template and include detailing. You can also choose to keep the original view or skip it completely. Click apply to place those views directly on your sheets.

To create a new sheet, simply click the ‘New Sheet’ button then assign sheet number, name, sort order, etc. and choose the title block.

Template Definition

You can choose a sheet directly from a project, but what if you wanted to start with something that is consistent right from the beginning? With Sheet Assistant, you can take any sheet layout you create and configure in the tool and save it as a template. Once you save a configuration, you can load them into your project under the ‘Configuration’ tab to use on your future projects.