Showing Beam Elevations

*** These instructions are obsolete in Revit 2011 ***

Revit Structure 2009 now has the ability to show beam elevations in plan views. It's a new button in the drafting bar named "Beam Annotation". But in order to show the T.O.S. elevations you must do some setup first.

1. On the Drafting Bar, select "Spot Elevation" -> "Spot Elevation"
2. Go in to the Properties dialogue box for Spot Elevations.
3. In the Type portion, select "Target (Project)" as your starting type, and then select "Edit/New"
4. Now select "Duplicate" to create a NEW Spot Elevation Type.
5. Name that new type "Beam Elevation (Project)".
6. Under the Constraints parameter, select the checkbox to "Rotate with Component".
   
7. Under Graphics, Symbol should be set to "", and Leader Arrowhead should be "None" (???maybe???).
   
8. Set other parameters as necessary.
9. Select OK to create the new Spot Elevation.
10. On a framing plan, highlight a beam, then select the "Beam Annotations" button on the drafting bar.
11. Usually in this dialogue, you will select the "All selected beams in current view", with the "Remove existing beam tags and spot elevations".
12. Under Annotation location and type, the middle top tag should be set to a Structural Framing Tag.
13. Set the Middle bottom tag to "Spot Elevation" and select "Beam Elevation (Project)". (If no spot elevations are available here, it's because you skipped step 6 above).
14. Once you hit ok, the beam you had highlighted should be retagged with an elevation. Under the properties for that spot elevation text, you can add prefixes and suffixes to show an elevation as (X'-XX").
15. Or under the original parameters for the Type, you can set the "Elevation Indicator" as a prefix or suffix, to create spot elevations such as TOS=X'-XX" (In this case you would probably need to create multiple spot elevation types.)