When you enable Worksharing and turn on worksets in a Revit project, Revit offers you two worksets by default – “Shared Levels and Grids” and “Workset1”. Anyone who has managed a Revit project with Worksharing should be familiar with the image seen below.
Workset1 is special in that it cannot be deleted. It also originally contains some key elements, like the Project Base and Survey points. Update: As per Steve’s comment, the PBP and Survey Point are not any longer assigned to Workset1.
Over the last year, I’ve been developing a system for how to use worksets more effectively. The background is that projects were previously set up with a myriad of worksets to start with (30+). Each workset would have the name of a service, e.g. Chilled Water Flow, and would then be used to toggle the visibility of said service in views. Ugh!
My aim has been to use worksets to split the model in a way that allows any person on the team to unload parts of the model they are not currently working on, thereby improving the load times and performance of the project on their machines. At the same time, I’ve been working to make sure worksets are not used for visibility, or as if they were a substitute for layers in CAD, which they are not.
My general strategy was to have the smallest number of worksets possible that would allow people to work on their areas of a model without loading others not needed to carry out their particular job. I started by adding the company initials to the Shared Levels and Grids workset offered by default, and not touching Workset1. Next, I added a workset for each linked model from different disciplines (this is MEP, so in general there would be one workset for the linked architectural model, one for the structural model, and one for civils/infrastructure). Worksets would grow from there as needed or required by the project, but total numbers would remain pretty low.
Also, central files were previously being saved with “Open workset default:” to “Last Viewed”, which is the default option. Instead, this is now being set to “Specify…”, so that each person opening the project gets a dialog asking them which workset(s) they want to load.
Still, that default Workset1 kept bothering me. I wasn’t happy about having it in our worksets, and the only reason I left it alone was because of this ominous warning from 2012. Then, at the beginning of the year, I finally decided to do what felt best for simplicity and workflow: I renamed Workset1 in new projects to serve as the starting workset for our discipline, e.g. ABC MEP.
I’m happy to report that, so far, I haven’t looked back. There haven’t been any issues related to the change, and the dialog to choose which worksets to open when first opening a project in the morning looks clean and productive.
