Revit Keynotes

Overview

Keynotes are a great tool in Revit, and can be used for much more than their intended use.

Introduction

Keynotes are essentially a tag that references an external file. For this page, we will say “keynote” an object and this essentially means “tag” an object with the ‘keynote’. To be even more specific, we are tagging an object per a keynote that is referencing an external file.

Intended Use

The intended use of keynotes is to keynote an item in Revit with the CSI Spec section corresponding to your specifications and therefore using the specifications more than drawing annotations. There are several major offices that have this as the standard way to annotate drawings… every single item in Revit gets a specification tag and there are virtually no text annotations on the drawings besides the CSI number. While useful for keeping things coordinated to your specifications, this is something that takes some getting used to, and many offices prefer to instead use long form text notations which tend to make the drawings easier to understand.

A Different Use

Because most offices don’t use the CSI specification tagging style —especially smaller offices— another way to use keynotes has emerged. The main way is to keynote general notes across drawings. This is very useful for turning typically written out notes or even something that may be tagged from an object, into a keynote and keeping that text easily coordinated across multiple different types. Especially beyond general notes, it can be used successfully for items such as demolition notes as well.