?️-BIM or CAD Data Extraction to Excel or DB
On your journey to migrating information into your Asset Information System and gathering missing data to populate it so that it can run effectively, it is worth considering what information you have on hand that you can easily convert.
There is no point in gathering more data than you need, it has a cost associated with it. So if you already have data embedded in your CAD files and Revit Models why not extract this data first, then go and gather the other information that you need?
In an early data drop from a Revit model via a database to excel we had 252 sheets with 3300 column headers. This was the data structure that came from Revit. Not all of the columns had data in them. The point being there is information, some of it useful that you can get, just because you have the model. This data needs to be cleaned and refined to isolate the useful information. Lots of tabs for categories such as “Nurse Call Devices” are totally irrelevant, but “Room” category could contain a lot of pertinent data that can be converted into useful information.
Prior to BIM (Building Information Model), there was CAD (Computer Aided Drawing). In CAD there my be attribute blocks that can contain information within them, depending on how the designers/contractors worked. The data will not be as rich as the BIM data but it could be of use. Also, these CAD files can be used as a basis for creating BIM models quite quickly using a tracing methodology. From basic room modeling with doors and windows and ceilings a lot of data can be generated from a converted CAD drawing.
We can help you by taking your existing CAD or Revit files and extracting data from them to either Excel Sheets or a Database.
In Revit, we would extract data by Category and would work with you on identifying which categories hold the content that is useful to you.
In CAD we would export data from any attribute blocks in the drawing. We can also do polylines around rooms to calculate perimeter and areas of rooms.
The Revit model.
A tool to select “Categories” in Revit and list out all the information that is in those categories. In this selection, we have only chosen 3 categories. Rooms, Doors & Windows. Revit has 138 different categories, only some of them are relevant.
We can remove blank columns so that only relevant data is exported.
We then export this information to Excel (or to a Database if that is your requirement)
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