Annotating Mechanical Sheets in Revit: Adding Detail with Tags and Annotations

Welcome back to the VDCI video coursework for the Revit MEP Mechanical. In the previous videos, we went ahead and populated really a lot of our sheets with different views. We put in some 3D views.

We had our plan views that we had from earlier, some enlarges here on the M401 sheet. Now what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go through these drawings and really kind of start to add the next level of detail, which would be tags and annotations and those kinds of things. So there's nothing I really need to add here on my Mechanical Cover Sheet.

So let's go to our Mechanical Level One. And a lot of times, I know we have the sheet views versus the working views. A lot of times when I'm doing a lot of tagging, those kinds of things, I could work on the sheet views in the actual views.

Sometimes I like to work on the sheet, just because I can see how things are going to lay out and go ahead. But you know, we're going to go ahead and work here on the sheet. So let's go ahead and start tagging.

So realistically, how you want to go about tagging, you can kind of go about a couple of different ways. From a mechanical perspective, there's nothing different from tagging windows or doors or anything like that. So I'm going to go ahead and start with my air terminals.

Learn Revit MEP

• Nationally accredited
• Create your own portfolio
• Free student software
• Learn at your convenience
• Authorized Autodesk training center

Learn More

So I'm going to go over here to Annotate. I'm going to go to my Tag by Category. I click on Tag by Category, and then I can go ahead and pick here.

So you can see that these are all going to tag with that information. Now, one thing that's also happening with Revit, specifically in newer versions of Revit, is I can actually have one tag for multiple items. And if they're the same, it'll show me the same tag.

So like this A here, this A here—I could have this be one tag. If I click on this Add/Remove Host, I can pick here and pick here. And notice this is now one tag with that.

And I could drag it out here, say, and I could pull this down and kind of let it snap and go like that. I can also pull it off to the side. If I wanted to have it off to the side, that one's going there.

So I'm going to have that one go straight. And you can kind of play with this as you see fit. It's okay if it's overlapping with other elements that you see here. It's wanting to tag the walls because I'm still in that Tag by Category, but I could keep going down, pick, pick—and then that leader didn't really show up.

That's okay, because I was too close. Go there to there.

And you can just work your way around doing this. If you have this Add/Remove Host selected, it's going to allow that. It's going to allow you to do multiple tagging.

I wouldn't necessarily want to do all of these like this. Notice how that Add/Remove Host is kind of there. So I'm not going to tag more than two here. But then, I could just go pick, pick, click off; pick, pick, click off. In older versions of Revit,

When we had multiple tags like this, but I wanted to combine the leaders, I'd actually have to stack the tags together. And that was actually kind of a really annoying process.

So this was a really good change. I want to say it came out in Revit 2022. But moving forward, they're making more and more improvements.

So I can just keep going down tagging my air terminals. And I'm going to click off, click, click, click off, click, click, click off. So that's one way of tagging manually. I'm going to go ahead and escape.

Let's go ahead and adjust these guys. So you can kind of use them to line up. If you wanted to do something—I'm not a huge fan of that.

I'm not really a huge fan. I typically like my tags to look something like this.

So I'm actually going to go ahead and pull these down, line it up, get my leaders in place properly. Now, if I did this, I might say, hey, let's go ahead and combine the four. So like this one, I could go ahead and delete.

I'm going to go ahead—now that even though this tag is already placed—I'm going to hit Add/Remove Host. And then I can pick on these two to add those to that tag.

As long as they are the same exact element, it will allow me to keep that same tag. If I were to, say, Add/Remove Host on this one and pick this guy over here—now they're the same CFM, so they're the same 300 CFM—but notice how this varies because this is like an A and this may be a B. We can't have those together because those are two different types.

So here I go ahead and, you know, we're going to clean this up a little bit. We can go ahead and make this a little bit cleaner as we go. Boom.

There's that. And again, this is going to be kind of a monotonous process. It's just one of these things with Revit—you’ve got to tag and annotate and document your design.

This one, I'm going to move over here, pull it out there, pull it out there. Now one thing you may notice about this tag is that it doesn't have any endpoint on it or anything like that. I personally really do like to have some kind of termination here at the end.

Now that is set on a tag-by-tag basis. I'm actually going to bring this one—this guy—kind of out here, do this. We want to go ahead and add an arrow to this.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this, Edit Type here, and Leader Arrowhead. I'm going to make this an Arrow Filled 15 Degree. Hit Apply, hit OK.

And that is going to go to all types of that. So you can see it has already populated that. I could also go ahead under Tag All.

I can go Tag All Not Tagged. Just like that. And I could select air terminals.

Now this is going to tag every single air terminal in my view. The one thing to remember about tags is that they are view-dependent. They're annotation objects.

So they're only going to be populated in this view. The information that they're pulling, though, is hosted to the element. So I can put the tag on in any view. But if I hit Apply—and I'm actually going to make sure that my leader is checked on—I'm going to make my leader a little shorter.

I'm going to make it just a quarter of an inch. There we go. Tag orientation, horizontal—all that is good.

I hit Apply. And it goes through and does that. Now, when you do this tag such as this, the kind of the crazy thing that ends up happening is it tags everything.

And this is kind of a double-edged sword with tags. In the previous version where it didn't have multiple leaders to be able to host to, this would work. And then I'd kind of pull these tags down, and I'd start to stack them like so. And this would be kind of the old style of doing it.

But now with the new tags, I actually really—I'm not a huge fan of that tool to do these kinds of tags because I would rather control. And if I go Tag by Category, hit Add/Remove Host, I'd like to be able to pick both of these and have one tag—or even have four tags, four leaders—and then be able to shift this guy over and then be able to adjust that.

So the Tag All is a nice tool for some instances, but it's not the end-all, be-all. It's not my favorite right now. So I'm going to go ahead and Tag by Category. Add/Remove Host is on.

I'm going to go ahead and pick these four and then just escape out. I'm going to go ahead and adjust these. I always like to have a straight portion coming off of my tag itself and then have a nice angle like that.

So it starts to look really clean. Again, I can hit TG, which is the Tag by Category, Add/Remove Host, pick, pick. And right now we're focusing just on the air terminals.

We will come back through and do ducts here in a few. So there we go. When you start, you just have to play this balance game with these tags.

Now, those are the air terminals themselves. If I hit TG and I go to tag ducts, you can see I have my different duct tags here. Now, on these larger ducts, you may notice that I have a leader on the larger ducts.

I actually don't want the leader. I want the tag to live within here. If I uncheck Leader, now I can pick in there.

Now I do not want to have my Add/Remove Host here. So I'm going to go ahead and uncheck Add/Remove Host so that I continue to tag the individual duct. There we go.

Maybe we'll go down here and do this one. Boom. So it wants to add or remove the host the entire time.

And I clicked it and it finally went away. Now, when you get to these smaller ducts, I may want to go ahead and have a little leader on it, because my text is going to override really that entire duct. You can see this is 20 × 12.

The text is starting to encroach on the linework a little bit. This is okay. I'd be fine leaving this like this and not having to pull it off.

But when I get down to these smaller ducts, I like to go ahead and have that. Now the one thing you may notice is that I am not tagging—I’m not going to be tagging—every single piece of duct.

Typically, I'll tag the duct when there's a change in the size. When I'm changing, I tag it once on these sizes, right? And when I do this turn here, I can go ahead and do the tag. And I might have to move some of my area tags.

You can just work your way down, just keep clicking. Okay. And then when I get to the change in size—see, this is a 10-inch.

This is a 10-inch. I'm not going to worry about tagging that. I'm just going to go ahead and tag each of the individual 8-inch ones.

And we might need to move some of these guys around. So just go through your model. Again, we'll be going through and doing this quite a bit.

It's going to take some time to do. This is another reason why I'm not a huge fan of using the Tag All. The reason being is that the Tag All command will tag every single piece of duct.

Now, I don't necessarily need to tag every single piece of duct. I could also start to combine some of these tags if I want to clean it up further. So let me show you—I don't necessarily need this one here.

I could select this one, Add or Remove Host, put another leader there, and go from there. I can pull this out here, pull this out. And this is really where that termination really starts to get helpful.

What I'm going to do is I'm actually not going to use an arrowhead on this one. I'm going to use a dot. So on this duct tag, what I'm going to do is I'm going to Edit Type.

So select Tag, Duct Size Tag, Edit Type. I'm going to change the Leader Arrowhead to be Dot Filled 1/16" or Dot Filled 1/16 Inch. There it is.

I hit Apply, hit OK. And you can see it kind of gives a nice termination to that end there.

Same thing I could do here. I could go ahead, Add or Remove Host, and make those tags as such. I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here.

When we come back, we'll move on to the next steps. See you then.