Simplified Input for Feet and Inches in Revit

By Tim Grimm, IMAGINiT Building Solutions

Users who work on projects with imperial units are probably quite familiar with the traditional way to input feet and inches in Revit. For example, 5'-10 1/4" would usually be typed pretty much as one reads it:

5 ' - 1 0 <Space> 1 / 4 <Shift> + " <Enter>

One of the rewarding things about teaching others is learning unexpected things from them. During a recent Revit Architecture Fundamentals class, I was standing next to a student, a student from Ukraine, providing a little over-the-shoulder coaching. I noticed that when he went to type the inch mark, rather than typing it as <Shift> + < " >, he was attempting to type it as < ' > < ' >.

"Oh," I said, "I understand why you would want to type it that way, because that's what it looks like, but that's not going to work." To my surprise though, it did!

Using the 5'-10 1/4" example again, it can be typed as:

5 ' - 1 0 <Space> 1 / 4 ' ' <Enter>

That's better, but this input can be further simplified by substituting a space for the dash, and by not typing the units at all, as follows:

5 <Space> 1 0 <Space> 1 / 4 <Enter>

Yes, that's better still.

Even more efficient might be substituting the decimal value for 1/4", as follows:

5 <Space> 1 0 . 2 5 <Enter>

All these input values yield the same result in Revit:

Comments

[Danny]

While that is a nice little quirk...Revit doesn't require any distance nomenclature for imperial. Simply typing 5 space 10 would give you 5'-10". Even easier!

[David]

You actually don't need any punctuation. 5 10 will be interpreted correctly.