Saturday, July 6, 2013

ArchiCAD 16/17 vs. Revit 2013/2014 - End User Customization

For those of us who like to create shortcuts and custom tool bars, this is an important subject.  Our productivity is greatly increased by the ability to create our own keyboard shortcuts and have our most used commands and tools on screen and available at all times.

 ArchiCAD

 Grade

 Revit

 Grade

 Keyboard  Shortcuts You can assign any command or tool to a single letter by itself or with a Shift, Ctrl and/or Alt key
A
You can assign any command or tool to a 2  or 3 letter /number combination.  Slightly faster than using Ctrl & Alt key combinations
A
 Toolbars Any command can be put on a tool bar.  You can create new toolbars, as many as you like
A
You can add tools to the Quick access toolbar, but not all commands can be used.  Very limited.  Tools that cannot be added: Browser Organization.  Deactivate View, each Keynote tool, each region (fill pattern) tool.  You can change the order of the ribbon tabs by holding down the Ctrl key and drag a tab to where you want.  But the changes are subject to change the next time you open Revit.  See below...  I'm surprised at how poorly flexible Revit is in this topic.
C-

The ribbon tabs in Revit 2014 can be re-arranged as mentioned above.  After you close and reopen Revit, the ribbon tabs may move back to where you had them before, or into a different configuration.  I would really like to control this behavior, so I did some testing and found that there are 2 major factors involved in ribbon tab location.
  1. The 3rd party ribbon tabs for the non out-of-the-box Revit tools you have installed
  2. The location of the Modify tab.
Per my testing, all the 3rd party tabs will place themselves before the Modify tab.  If you have more than one 3rd party tab, the 3rd party tabs will order themselves in a particular order amongst themselves.  The 3rd party tabs will always be side-by-side in that ordained order.  I do not know what controls that order, but it is not according to the tab name.

The images below, show the progression that led me to this conclusion.  Notice how the 3rd party tabs load after all the standard Revit tabs load.  The green lines map the movement of the 3rd party tabs.  Please leave me a comment if you find any of this to be un-true.