4/5/2021 Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Part 3 Editing Data in Excel – RVIT

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Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Part 3 Editing

Data in Excel

POSTED ON JANUARY 19, 2017JANUARY 24, 2018 BY JASON KUNKEL POSTED IN TIPTAGGED
EXPORT TO EXCEL, NAVISWORKS, REVIT
Back in Part 2 we were able to export data from the items in our Navisworks model, with the critical step
of adding a key to each item, a unique identifier that we can use to round-trip that information back into
Navisworks.

In this post we are going to open up the exported .CSV file, add some more data, and make some tweaks
that will make our lives easier when we pull this back into Navisworks.

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The first step is easy: track down the .CSV file I exported and open it up in Excel. Depending on how
your Excel is installed, you can probably just double-click on it to open it up. Once it’s open a quick
glance tells me that yes indeed, this is the data I selected to export. Everything is working as expected.

A closer glance usually adds a touch of confusion. See that first row? What essentially are the column
headers? When I first open this file up, all I see are “Element”, “Item”, “Element”, “Item”, and “Item”.
Not very useful to let me know what data is what. But, if I go in and stretch the height of that row, I can
now see what’s going on: when the data was exported, Navisworks made the headers the Category and
Property for easy reference, but it put a line break in between them, making them si ing on top of each
other.

Top row looks weird

Top row looks much be er

This is the first thing I like to clean up in my Excel file. The line break is not good for data integrity and it
can make things confusing when I’m trying to get this data back into my Navisworks model. So I go
through and rename the headers, simplifying the name and definitely ge ing rid of the line breaks. I
usually get rid of spaces as well, this also makes the importing of the data simpler. The forma ing won’t
be read over, so I like to make that top row bold, just for a visual cue that it’s column headings.

New names, no spaces, no line breaks

This is where I start adding my new data. It does’t ma er where I put this column, it does ma er what I
name it. All these columns need to be named something unique. I also follow the no spaces, no breaks
naming convention I laid out before. Keeps things simpler later on down the road.

In our example, we are adding hardware information and keyset info to the doors. So I just add two
columns, give them good names and then add my data. I can use any of the Excel functions I need to, I
can sort by DoorNum if I want, all I need to make sure is that the top row stays at the top, and the data
in the row itself stays intact.

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New data added

I have had weird things happen with forma ing and data types when I bring the new data back into
Navisworks, so I will typically just set everything to Text, not General in Excel. That seems to make
whatever I write in Excel show up just like it in Navisworks.

Now it’s all good, I do a Save As to save this file as a native Excel format file. You can reconnect with the
original .CSV format, but I usually have done something (like making text bold) that the .CSV file
doesn’t like, so it’s Excel for me.

And that’s pre y much it. This step is probably the easiest. I do like to emphasize cleaning up those
column header names; that will make things a lot easier in the next step.

Speaking of which… now that we have our extra data added in the same row as our elements with the
unique identifier, the next post will cover linking the Excel sheet back into Navisworks and ge ing the
data to show up.

3 thoughts on “Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Part 3

Editing Data in Excel”

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