Naming Standard Documentation
How to rename Revit families and types in bulk, and how to build a naming standard of your own.
Naming Standard renames the families and types that are loaded into your project. Everything you do is staged first, so you can check the result before anything touches the model. How to use: 1. Download Naming Standard from the marketplace and run the installer. 2. Start Revit and open a project. Naming Standard works on a project, not on a family file. 3. On the BIM Hive tab, click Naming Standard. 4. Choose what to work on: All Families, Active View, or Selected Families. Narrow it further with the category and family filters if you need to. 5. Choose whether you are renaming family names or type names with the Apply to control. 6. Use the tools down the left - find and replace, prefix and suffix, case, numbering - or pick a naming standard from the Naming Standard card. Each tool runs on the rows you have ticked, or on everything listed. 7. Check the grid. Rows that will change are highlighted, and a row Revit would reject is marked in red. 8. Click Apply. A preflight window lists any duplicate names or invalid characters and lets you skip those rows before continuing. Nothing reaches the model until you click Apply, and the whole batch is applied as one step, so a single undo reverses it.
Building your own naming standard
Click Manage Standards to open the builder. 1. Start from one of the BIMHIVE examples and click Duplicate, so you always have the original to come back to. 2. On the Structure tab, add the parts your names need - originator, category, description, material, size - and set the separator that joins them. 3. For each part, choose where its value comes from. Hover any option in the list to see what it does. "Found anywhere in the name" copes with families named to somebody else's convention. "Whatever is left over" is usually what you want for the description, because it cannot repeat a word another part has already used. 4. Fill in "If nothing is found" for anything that must always appear. A value that comes from there is shown as assumed in the preview, so you can tell a guess from a fact. 5. Use the preview at the bottom to check the standard against real families from your model before you save.
Abbreviations
The Dictionaries tab holds the short forms - Structural Columns becomes SC, Concrete becomes CONC. They are shared by every standard, so a correction only has to be made once. The "Also known as" column is what lets a standard read other people's content. Add the spellings their families actually use - Column, COL, RectCol - and the standard will recognise them. To build a long list quickly, click Edit in Excel, fill the spreadsheet in, and click Bring back in. Rows in the file are added or updated and rows it does not mention are left alone, so it is safe to send one sheet to a colleague and import what comes back.
Renaming in a spreadsheet
Use Excel then Export to Excel to send the list out. Type the names you want in the New Family Name and New Type Name columns, save the file, then use Excel then Import from Excel to bring them back. Rows are matched on element id, so sorting, filtering or deleting rows in the sheet is safe. A blank cell means leave that name alone, so you can fill in only the rows you care about. Nothing reaches the model on import - the names are staged in the grid, and Apply is still the step that writes them.
Things Revit does not allow
System family names - Basic Wall, Generic Models and similar - are fixed by Revit and cannot be renamed. Naming Standard only offers Type Name for those, so you will not stage a change that could never be applied. Renaming a family inside a project does not rename the .rfa file it came from. If you reload that family from your library later, the old name comes back with it, so rename the library file as well. Two families in the same project cannot share a name. If a rename would create a duplicate, the preflight window lists it before anything is applied and lets you skip that row.
Where your settings are saved
Your standards and abbreviation dictionaries are stored per user, so they follow your Windows account rather than a single project. Standards are one file each, named after the standard, which makes a company convention something you can email to a colleague or keep in a shared folder. The built-in BIMHIVE examples are never written to disk - they are rebuilt each time the add-in starts, so you can always get back to a working example.