I recently got an email from an ArchSmarter reader who was looking for help renumbering sheets in his project. He’s using a numerical sequence for his sheet numbers, like A101, A102, A103 on up.
This approach works great until. . .
. . .you realize you missed a sheet and need to add one to the middle of the sequence. Ugh.
This ever happen to you?
Now you have to renumber all the sheets that come after that new sheet. Not a big deal if you only have 5 or 10 sheets.
But what if you have 100 sheets to renumber? Or 200?
No fun.
So this ArchSmarter reader was wondering if there was a way to automatically renumber the sheets. Turns out, Dynamo and Revit macros work great for this type of application.
In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Dynamo graph to easily renumber your Revit sheets.
Don’t feel like doing it yourself?
No problem! I also created a Revit macro that does the same process and has an easy to use interface.
Let’s get started!
First Steps
The first thing you need to do is make sure your sheets are in the right order.
If you’ve added new sheets, number these sheets with the number of the sheet you want them to appear after followed by a suffix.
For example, if you want one of the new sheets to come right after sheet “A102”, renumber the sheet as “A102A”. This way it will sort right behind sheet “A102”. Once you run the Dynamo graph or Revit macro, this sheet will get numbered “A103”. If you want your new sheets to group together, use an “A”, “B”, and “C” prefix as needed.
Once you have your Project Browser sheet list looking good, choose either the Dynamo or Revit macro method below easily renumber your sheets.
Dynamo
If you feel like getting your hands dirty and working with some nodes, Dynamo is the way to go. The video below takes you step-by-step through the process of creating the sheet renumbering graph. As you’ll see, it’s very straightforward.
If you haven’t tried Dynamo before, this tutorial is a great way to get started.
Here is the completed graph:
The trick with the Dynamo method is making sure you select the correct subset of your sheets. As you’ll see with the Revit macro, this process is much easier with an interface.
Revit Macro
Don’t feel like messing with nodes and just want to renumber your sheets? No problem! This Revit macro takes all the work out of the process.
To start, first load the macro’s RVT file. Once you’ve done that, make the project file containing the sheets you want to renumber the active file in Revit.
Next, go to Manage > Macro Manager and select the “Renumber Sheets” macro. Click the run button.
In the Renumber Sheets interface, select the range of sheets you want to renumber. Enter the prefix for the new sheet numbers. Next, enter the start number and the increment value. You can choose to increment the sheets by 1, 2, 5 or 10.
Once you’ve entered your information, click the “OK” button to renumber your sheets. The macro will renumber all the sheets in a few seconds.
It’s that easy!
Download the Free Macro
You can download the macro from the free ArchSmarter Toolbox. Don’t have access? Sign up for ArchSmarter updates in the form below and get immediate access to this and other time-saving Revit macros!
Hi Michael! I have just recently found your website and ever since it has been a great help. Thanks for doing this!
I’m quite new to the concept of Revit Macros, so I can’t write them yet. But I was wondering if you can do something to choose which sheets you want to rename. I work with a “design phase” parameter for the sheets, so could you get a field in the Macro where you can filter the sheets by this parameter?
Thanks Raquel! I appreciate the support. So you’d like to rename a collection of sheets having a specific “design phase” parameter? Am I understanding you correctly?
Hi, Michael, thank for the tip. It is really useful. But I just wonder if this concept work with custom shared parameter?
Instead of Sheet Number, I want to renumber my sheet sequencing number. I tried creating a dynamo file following your concept, however, at the end, I got a warning of “internal error.” The only different I noticed is that the sheet sequencing number is a custom shared parameter. So I used List.Sort instead of List.SortbyFunction; I also do not convert obj to string since I am using number format for the custom shared parameter, not text format.
The project that I’m working on have about 600 sheets and I have to includes the sequencing number on the drawing index. I used to manually entering each number and sort them by a custom shared parameter in Revit. Therefore, adding and subtracting sheets caused “crazy” time consuming process. I really need to find a different way to make it faster.
Thank you.
Hi Michael, I also need help with the same issue as Nhan Lieu, would be greatly appreciated.
Nhan and Kliton,
Sorry for the delay. This is actually easier to do than renumbering the sheet number. The trick is to first sort the list using sheet numbers. You then generate the number sequence based on the number of sheets. Then you update the sequence parameter. Here’s a link to a screenshot of the script:
https://archsmarter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ArchSmarter-generatesheetsequencenumber.png
Let me know if you have any questions.