There is some interesting work going on with the excel connector that you can expect to see soon. You will soon be able to access the same viewer that you see on https://speckle.xyz/ directly inside your Speckle Excel connector. This is going to help a ton with making sense of your BIM data. In the simple gif below, I import all the wall data from my archicad model into an excel table, and then sort it by length to quickly tell where my longest walls are.
Please leave a comment if you have some functionality that you would like to see in excel now that you can visualize your data!
Regarding feedback for functionality … It would be interesting to add maybe filter views to this connector in order to make the input easier to track.
adding property results in the coloring of elements like with the filter groups in the viewer. This might be a bit tricky though as the properties are not yet in the commit when they are entered into Excel. By taking a look at the color schema one would be able to check if the values are assigned correctly before sending them to Speckle again
Coloring of a row or a special cell colors the element according to RGB value of the cell … the more manual approach to the above. Still interesting if people want to add a more manual color scheme. This maybe helps to sort the model a bit before adding parameters.
Which parameters and properties can be streamed to excel? I’m super curious about building material properties since CO2-take off is on top of the list.
Awesome!
Looking forward to test it and share it internally.
This is a great reason for people to switch from Revit Excel add-in to Speckle Excel! Some users are quite keen on updating Revit parameters. I can see ways to setup some sort of Excel template file to help people in the process. One sheet to receive the commit in, one sheet to modify certain values and one sheet with the Objects.BuiltElements.Revit.ParameterUpdater objects to send. Or would there be a way to have the Speckle Excel connector facilitate that process (update Revit parameters from Excel) more easily?
We were discussing exactly this the other day We don’t know for sure yet, but we’ll look at how this could be enabled in a more natural way inside the Excel connector itself
Did you have anything specific in mind? Maybe lessons learned form the ParameterPanther tool?
One thing that pops up often is edit rights to specific data. So ideally, the BIM manager / BIM engineer can specify a certain set of properties in the model (e.g. fire rating parameters for walls, floors, columns, etc.) that another party (e.g. fire engineer) can edit.
And about UX: “Excel is king”. It’s really easy to work with tabular data, copy values, select multiple rows, filter, etc. Something like ParameterPanther would have a really hard time to compete with that, the PoC would only allow editing 1 item at a time. So it’s about keeping the power of Excel while allowing users to edit Revit parameters (probably the same approach as with ParameterPanther: create the Objects.BuiltElements.Revit.ParameterUpdater objects in the background and send them to a specific branch so the Revit engineer can receive them?)
EDIT: I think the first point about edit rights to specific data, is probably part of a bigger conversation about account permissions and granularity (e.g. various types of access to certain branches, etc.)
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We don’t know for sure yet, but we’ll look at how this could be enabled in a more natural way inside the Excel connector itself 