Excel Exchange

Excel Exchange

Moves schedules, parameters, tables and sheet lists between Revit and Excel, and brings your edits back into the model after a preview you can trust.

How to use

1. Launch Excel Exchange from BimCode with your project open. The window reads the current model's schedules, categories, title blocks and any workbooks you have already linked.
2. Pick the tab for the job at hand:
   • Schedules — select any number of schedules and export them to one workbook, one worksheet per schedule. Choose Editable round-trip when the values need to come back into Revit, or Presentation copy for a read-only handout that keeps grouped rows, totals and displayed text (optionally merged onto a single worksheet).
   • Parameters — choose categories and a scope (whole model, active view or current selection), click Read parameters, tick the ones you want and click Export. White cells hold instance values you can edit, yellow cells hold type values, and pink and gray cells are for reference only.
   • Revit tables — choose an Excel workbook and place its worksheets in Revit as drafting views, legends or schedule tables, keeping text, fills, merged cells, column widths and row heights.
   • Sheets — export a Sheet Manager workbook, add or update rows in Excel, optionally list which views go on which sheet and where, then bring it back to create and renumber sheets in one pass.
   • Tools — place family instances from a list of coordinates, color the active view by any parameter value, round-trip family parameters while a family is open, and set a rectangular crop with two clicks.
3. Edit the workbook in Excel and save it as .xlsx. Leave the hidden columns and worksheets in place — they are how Revit recognizes each row when the file comes back.
4. Back in Revit, click Preview import. Every change is checked first and listed as ready, skipped or failed, each with a plain reason.
5. Click Apply in Revit. Changes are written in a single step you can reverse with one Undo. By default nothing is written if any row fails.
6. Open Sync to see every workbook linked to this project. Update Revit from a workbook, refresh a workbook from Revit, switch a link to Live on Excel Save, or unlink it.

Good to know

• Microsoft Excel does not need to be installed — workbooks are written and read directly. When Excel is available, exports can open in it automatically.
• An export never replaces a good workbook with a broken one: the new file is written and checked first, then swapped into place.
• Workbooks remember which project they came from. A workbook exported from another model, or one whose values changed in Revit after the export, is flagged in the preview instead of being applied blindly.
• Type values affect every instance of that type. Conflicting edits to the same type value in different rows are blocked until you resolve them.
• Values from linked models, calculated values and read-only parameters are exported for reference and are never written back.
• A live link only watches its workbook while the Excel Exchange window is open, and pauses for your review whenever a conflict is found. Manual mode is the safer default for a workbook several people edit.
• Revit creates legends by copying an existing one, so a project needs at least one legend before tables can be placed as legends.
• Your defaults and named setups are saved for you and can be exported and imported from the Setups tab to share with colleagues.
• The Help tab inside the window has step-by-step walkthroughs for each workflow.