Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Part 1 Selecting Elements

Let’s work with collecting some information from an appended Revit model in Navisworks. For my example, I need to add hardware and keying information to all of my doors. This data could be easily collected in Revit itself, but there are a lot of owners out there who don’t have or use Revit; there is no need to edit the model on that level, so we are leveraging Navisworks to add data to our models from a format that is easy to use, namely Excel.

A Navisworks model is a bit of a chameleon. Depending on what type of other file you append, Navisworks will restructure the data from that file into its format in the Selection Tree. For example, if you bring in a DWG the “Layer” tier in the tree refers to an actual DWG layer, but if you append a Revit model, the Layer in the Navisworks Selection Tree ties itself to a Revit level, and tries to collect everything associated with that level. Understanding that, you need to do a little research before you know at what tree layer you can find…

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