Create Detailed Electrical Cover Sheets with Symbols and Notes

Our electrical cover sheet is looking really good. Let's go ahead and complete it by adding in some symbols and notes. Let's start by adding in our lighting symbols.

We find them in our project browser under Legends. They are called lighting types and symbols. Double-click to open it up.

Now the cool thing about this legend is we have not used regular line work to create our symbols. Instead, we're pulling from the actual Revit families. Let's click on one of these lights.

We'll notice that it is a Revit family. It's a family lighting fixture, plain surface lighting fixture. It's awesome because what happens if we make a change to this family? It will automatically update in this symbols legend.

So let's go ahead and complete this symbols legend. One way is to copy down, copy-paste what's already existing. But let's say we didn't have any symbols.

Learn Revit MEP

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

Learn More

What I like to do is find the family from the Family Browser. So I go to the project browser and then find the Families folder, and I'll scroll down and I'm looking for the family that I need. It's going to be here in lighting fixtures, and I'm looking for a downlight rectangular LED.

I'll expand that out, and I've already got the square. So I want the rectangle. So I'll select the 25-watt rectangle, and I'll drag it over, and there is my rectangle family.

Isn't that cool? And it's a symbol. I can use the Align tool to make sure that everything is aligning up here. Let's see if I can get this.

If it doesn't want to align, I can simply draw a detailed line and move it into place. We'll go ahead and do it that way. There we go, and we've got our two lights.

Now let's go ahead to our gymnasium pendant light. This is that new custom family that we created, and we'll also find it in lighting fixtures. We'll find it under gym light fixture, and we have just one.

We'll drag and drop and place that. We'll align it center to center with the others. So there's our gymnasium pendant light.

Now we have a wall sconce, and this will open up something else we need to know about this symbol family. If we look in our lighting fixtures, we do have a sconce light here. We'll click the plus sign next to it.

Let's grab the 60-watt fixture and drag it in and look at my cursor. It looks like it's placing nothing. That's because it's taking a plan view, yet we have a wall sconce.

So what we want to do is check our view. Right now it's set to floor plan, but we can pick different views from each family. Let's go ahead and pick elevation front, and now we have that wall sconce, and it shows up no problem in our symbols legend.

Again, we might need to line it up. I'm just going to drag it over until it lines up center to center. Maybe I need to move it back a little bit.

There we go, and now we have all of our lighting symbols, and they're not line work. They're actual families. How cool is that? So let's go back to our electrical cover sheet and add this symbols legend in.

Let's scroll up here to our legends, and we have our lighting types and symbols. I'm going to drag and drop and place it on the left side here. So there it is, and I want to select it.

I don't need an extra title because it already has its own title built in. I'm going to click this legend, and under its properties window, I'm going to select no title. That looks really good.

Okay, that was a ton of fun, so let's add in some more symbols right here. The symbols I want to add now are my power symbols. So again, under legends, power symbols, double-click, and here it is.

I've done on this one basically the same thing. You can see that each of these symbols is actually a Revit family, and in fact, we can even change the view from what it is. We can actually see the little box, or go back to the plan view and get that symbol.

So these are real Revit families, and the one that's missing is our duplex receptacle GFCI. So I need to go to my Families Browser, which is the project browser, and then scroll all the way down to families, and I want electrical fixtures, and then we have duplex receptacle. Open that one up, and I have GFCI.

That's the one I want. I'll drag it into here, and I'll notice that it's kind of weird when it brings it in. It brings it in as a symbol, and we also see the little box.

So I'll just place it right here for now and click. It lines up with the others, and it looks really good. I'm actually hiding that little box behind this wall here, and what is my wall? It's just a detail boundary item, and so it's a tricky little way to hide that box but show the symbol.

Alright, so that looks really good. We've got the power symbols. They're all families, all listed out.

Let's go back to our cover sheet, and I want to drag that symbol legend right in. So I'm going to minimize my families, scroll up to find my legends category, and I want my power symbols. Drag and drop.

Place that in there, and I'll notice that I need to get rid of that extra title. So I'll switch it to no title, and I can line these up a little bit better so that the two titles are in alignment. One trick I use is to overlap them exactly, then I can line them up almost perfectly.

The closer in I zoom, the easier it is to line these up. Maybe one more time. There we go.

Pretty close, and now all I have to do is move it over and move it in a straight line so that they stay in alignment with each other. Okay, let's go ahead and add some notes in here. We have in our legends, we have general notes electrical.

Drag and drop that in. We've got our general electrical notes. We'll have to follow that same process.

We'll select it, remove its title, line it up with the one next to it, zoom in nice and close, line it up. Pretty close is usually okay, and then we can move it in a straight line to the right, and it will stay in alignment. I might zoom out and adjust these over just a little bit to kind of give them the room they need and make them look spaced evenly.

Once I'm happy with that, we are really close to wrapping up this cover sheet. I simply need to change my subtitle, so the main title elementary school electrical that looks good. The subtitle now we're on to the final, so it's going to be final and then our first name and our last name.

And that's it, we've got our Revit electrical cover sheet.