How to renumber doors in Revit without changing the numbers you have already issued

The problem

Door numbers end up on plans, door schedules, specifications and the contractor’s ironmongery list. Once a set has been issued, those numbers have to stay put. Then the design changes: three doors are added, two are moved, one is deleted. The new doors need numbers that fit the existing sequence, and nothing that was already issued should change.

Revit fills in the Mark parameter as doors are placed, in the order they were drawn, which rarely matches the order anyone wants to read them in.

The native ways, and their limits

• +By hand in Properties: select a door, type its Mark. Fine for five doors; slow and error-prone for fifty, and there is no check for duplicates or gaps until you look.
• +In a door schedule: Mark is editable in the schedule, so you can type down a column. Faster to type, but you still decide every number yourself, and the schedule order is not the plan order.
• +With a Dynamo script: a script can sort doors by location and write Marks. Powerful, but it needs building and maintaining, and most scripts renumber everything they touch, including doors that were already issued.

With Numerate: number in the order you choose, and review before writing

Numerate also works out door hand from the geometry, previews it, and lets you swap it where you disagree, and it handles doors inside groups.

1. 01Open Numerate from the Bim3Lab tab and choose what to number: doors, windows or curtain wall panels.
2. 02Choose the sweep direction: the order in which openings are counted across the plan.
3. 03Build the code from the parts you need: your own text, any parameter of the opening, its level, the room on either side, or the area it stands in. Restart the count on each level, in each room or in each area if your standard asks for it.
4. 04To keep issued numbers, continue the existing sequence: Numerate numbers the new openings after the highest number in use and leaves every other Mark exactly as it is.
5. 05Check the review list. Every proposed change is shown row by row before anything is written; untick any you want to keep. Gaps in the sequence are reported, never quietly filled.
6. 06Write. Only the rows you approved change.

Tips that save a resubmission

• +Agree the code format with the team before the first issue. Changing the format later means changing every number.
• +Number by level or by room when doors are referenced room by room in the specification: new doors then disturb only their own room.
• +Keep the review step even when you are confident. It is where a wrong sweep direction or a stray door from a linked group shows up.

Numerate, on video

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Questions