Someone in cost planning wants the schedules. All of them, in Excel, by this afternoon. Revit has an export command for that. It handles one schedule at a time.
Exporting one schedule the native way
- Open the schedule in Revit. The export command is only available while a schedule is the active view.
- Go to File, Export, Reports, Schedule.
- Pick a folder and a file name. Set the file type to CSV, which Excel opens directly. The older choice is delimited text.
- The Export Schedule dialog opens. Decide whether to export the title and the column headers.
- Click OK.
One tip before you click OK. If you plan to sort or filter in Excel, switch off the title so the column headers land in row one.
Opening it in Excel
Double-click the CSV and Excel opens it. Save it as a workbook before you format anything, because a CSV keeps no formatting.
Watch any column with leading zeros. Excel reads a door mark of 007 as the number 7 when it opens a CSV. To keep the zeros, import the file through Excel's Data tab and set that column to text.
Values come across the way the schedule displays them. If a column shows a unit suffix, Excel treats it as text, so check a few number columns before anyone starts adding them up.
Where this gets slow
For one schedule, that's a couple of minutes and nothing to complain about.
A real project has a door schedule, a window schedule, room schedules by level, finishes, wall types, a sheet list and whatever the consultants asked for. Each one is the same routine: open the view, go through the export menu, name the file, confirm the dialog, then open it in Excel and save it as a workbook. There's no way to tick several schedules in that dialog.
Then the model changes, and next month you do all of it again. On a list of forty, one always gets missed.
Export every schedule in the project in a single run. The 7-day trial covers all 52 NexionTools add-ins and needs no card. Start the 7-day trial
Exporting them all in one pass
Schedule Export is the NexionTools tool for this. It's paid, and it's part of the trial.
- Open it from the NexionTools tab in the ribbon and stay on the schedules side.
- Tick the schedules you want. Search and category filters help you build the list quickly.
- Choose the format: CSV, Excel, Revit TXT or PDF.
- Run the export.
Choose Excel and you get workbooks straight away, with nothing to re-save. You can also run several formats in the same pass, so you don't have to rebuild the selection for each one.
The same tool has a sheets side. Sheets go out as PDF, DWG, DGN or raster images, which is useful when the schedules are only one part of an issue.
Some things to know before you rely on it:
- Schedules are picked from the list. The select-by-rule helper only applies to sheets.
- Settings aren't remembered between sessions. Next time you open it, formats and paths are back to their defaults.
- The export is still Revit's. A schedule that comes out badly by hand will come out the same way in a batch.
If the data has to come back
Everything above is one direction, from Revit to a file. That's right for cost plans, reports and handing data to people who only need to read it.
If the spreadsheet is going to be edited and those values need to end up in the model, exporting a schedule won't get you there, because Revit has no import for it. That's a different job, and it's covered in how to edit Revit parameters in Excel.
Next time someone asks for every schedule, send the lot in one go. Schedule Export is in the trial, which gives you all 52 tools for 7 days with no card, and 12 of them stay free afterwards. Start the 7-day trial