Book Image

Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data

By : Ernesto Pellegrino, Manuel André Bottiglieri, Gavin Crump, Luisa Cypriano Pieper, Dounia Touil
Book Image

Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data

By: Ernesto Pellegrino, Manuel André Bottiglieri, Gavin Crump, Luisa Cypriano Pieper, Dounia Touil

Overview of this book

Business intelligence software has rapidly spread its roots in the AEC industry during the last few years. This has happened due to the presence of rich digital data in BIM models whose datasets can be gathered, organized, and visualized through software such as Autodesk Dynamo BIM and Power BI. Managing and Visualizing Your BIM Data helps you understand and implement computer science fundamentals to better absorb the process of creating Dynamo scripts and visualizing the collected data on powerful dashboards. This book provides a hands-on approach and associated methodologies that will have you productive and up and running in no time. After understanding the theoretical aspects of computer science and related topics, you will focus on Autodesk Dynamo to develop scripts to manage data. Later, the book demonstrates four case studies from AEC experts across the world. In this section, you’ll learn how to get started with Autodesk Dynamo to gather data from a Revit model and create a simple C# plugin for Revit to stream data on Power BI directly. As you progress, you’ll explore how to create dynamic Power BI dashboards using Revit floor plans and make a Power BI dashboard to track model issues. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to develop a script to gather a model’s data and visualize datasets in Power BI easily.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Overview of Digitalization and BIM Data
5
Section 2: Examples and Case Studies from Experts around the World
10
Section 3: Deep Dive into Autodesk Dynamo

Exporting the datasets to Excel

Here we are – we have a script that collects various datasets from multiple Revit models. Now, it's time to write those datasets to Excel. The goal is to separate that information into different Excel sheets. Remember, we want to be as organized as possible, and we don't want to export all of the data into a single Excel sheet. The sheet could be very long if we use complex Revit models, and Excel isn't a good solution for extended datasets. And by extended, I mean 100,000+ rows. That would cause problems later on when working with Microsoft Power BI. So, let's learn how to do that:

  1. The first thing we must do is create a new Excel file on our PC.
  2. Next, switch to Dynamo and save the file if you haven't done that recently.
  3. Now, place the Data.ExportExcel OOTB node. The node takes six inputs, one of which is optional. Let's start by providing filePath first. To do that, we want to place a File Path node...