Given that I've been using Revit for so long and I didn't know it was possible, I thought it might help others who like a nicely formatted schedule. I apologize if this is common knowledge - I did revit training ages ago and I'm really due for a refresher. In any case:
It always drove me nuts that I couldn't nicely format schedules in revit - bolded totals, clean lines, etc. You click on a cell, you can't change the text. You click on a header, you can change the text. The totals, you can't change. It leads to a lot of schedules that look like this:

Now maybe that's fine in CD or for a massive + complicated door schedule, but for a simple schedule that you might be showing a client early in the design process, it's a bit clunky. What I discovered one day, somewhat by accident, was that if you select an entire column you can over-ride the text settings! When I realized that this didn't affect the Total text, I had a bit of a eureka moment: if I set the default schedule text to be the style I want for the totals (bold), I can just select all of the columns and over-ride the rest of the schedule to be normal text! Now, with some tweaks to the gridlines, it looks like this - a little better!

(be sure to highlight your headers and reset them, otherwise they're overwritten too)
After even more trial and error, and much frustration, I came to my final realization - when you select a column, the formatting box changes ever so slightly to be two rows rather than one. Select a bunch of columns, and it expands yet again:

What this means is, you have a chance to change all of your row formatting! It's not immediately obvious, but if you select your linetype first and then click the border you want, you'll change the line type + weight of the schedule grid. It's deceptive, because it doesn't show lineweight. Your settings here apply to each section of the schedule that's separated by a total. In other words, the "bottom border" is the line right before the total, the middle border is the line after each schedule row, and the top border is the top border in the schedule. Additionally, if you really want a border to not show up, you have to turn it on and then off. If you have all of your columns highlighted at once, you have to ensure you get all of the settings at once. If you go back and change one column's setting, it'll over-ride everything and it's really annoying. A few tweaks later and now I have a presentation/graphic schedule that I can apply to anything:

Perfect! A much nicer schedule for presentations, client packages, and things like quick massing studies where you want to see floor + area totals of conceptual masses. Of course, as is the nature of Revit, you can't save this as a template because of all the over-rides. So, get used to the process over over-riding the font and tweaking the borders.
I feel stupid for not knowing this sooner, but Revit has never been the most user-friendly program. My hope is that by putting this here, others who are in the same situation will learn something. If you have any additional schedule formatting tips, please share!
(This is for Revit 2016 and earlier - I haven't upgraded to 2017 yet so maybe some of this is fixed?)
It always drove me nuts that I couldn't nicely format schedules in revit - bolded totals, clean lines, etc. You click on a cell, you can't change the text. You click on a header, you can change the text. The totals, you can't change. It leads to a lot of schedules that look like this:
Now maybe that's fine in CD or for a massive + complicated door schedule, but for a simple schedule that you might be showing a client early in the design process, it's a bit clunky. What I discovered one day, somewhat by accident, was that if you select an entire column you can over-ride the text settings! When I realized that this didn't affect the Total text, I had a bit of a eureka moment: if I set the default schedule text to be the style I want for the totals (bold), I can just select all of the columns and over-ride the rest of the schedule to be normal text! Now, with some tweaks to the gridlines, it looks like this - a little better!
(be sure to highlight your headers and reset them, otherwise they're overwritten too)
After even more trial and error, and much frustration, I came to my final realization - when you select a column, the formatting box changes ever so slightly to be two rows rather than one. Select a bunch of columns, and it expands yet again:
What this means is, you have a chance to change all of your row formatting! It's not immediately obvious, but if you select your linetype first and then click the border you want, you'll change the line type + weight of the schedule grid. It's deceptive, because it doesn't show lineweight. Your settings here apply to each section of the schedule that's separated by a total. In other words, the "bottom border" is the line right before the total, the middle border is the line after each schedule row, and the top border is the top border in the schedule. Additionally, if you really want a border to not show up, you have to turn it on and then off. If you have all of your columns highlighted at once, you have to ensure you get all of the settings at once. If you go back and change one column's setting, it'll over-ride everything and it's really annoying. A few tweaks later and now I have a presentation/graphic schedule that I can apply to anything:
Perfect! A much nicer schedule for presentations, client packages, and things like quick massing studies where you want to see floor + area totals of conceptual masses. Of course, as is the nature of Revit, you can't save this as a template because of all the over-rides. So, get used to the process over over-riding the font and tweaking the borders.
I feel stupid for not knowing this sooner, but Revit has never been the most user-friendly program. My hope is that by putting this here, others who are in the same situation will learn something. If you have any additional schedule formatting tips, please share!
(This is for Revit 2016 and earlier - I haven't upgraded to 2017 yet so maybe some of this is fixed?)
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