After completing this lesson, you'll be able to understand type catalogs, export a family type, and create a type catalog. The objective domains covered are 2.3.b. Export a family to create a type catalog. A type catalog can contain multiple family types in a tabular format. The type catalog can contain dimensions and other data such as structural properties. A catalog is much more efficient when there are large number of family types to create. Also, the user only selects the types required for the project, which can help keep down file size. A type catalog is simply a text file that shares the same line as your Revit family. Both files have to be placed in the same folder. Assuming the text format is correct, a type catalog will be displayed when a Revit family is loaded into the project. Go ahead and open up the family 023 Type Catalog.rfa. The family file will open up in a floor plane. We're now going to export this family a type catalog. Before we do this, let's investigate the family types that are created. On the Create ribbon, select Family Types. In the Family Types dialog box, you'll notice here that we have one family type created 12 inch diameter. This family type is comprised of a number of different parameters. We have some dimensional parameters controlling the pile size, and we also have some custom parameters set up for structural analysis. In this case, the force in the z-axis as well as some custom parameters for identity data, in this case the pile number. Click "Okay" to the Family Types dialog box. We will now go ahead and export our catalog. To do this, select File, Export, Family Types. Ensure that we save this into same project folder. Don't change the folder name as this will by default match the RFA file. Click "Save". A text file has now been created and stored in our project folder. Let's go ahead and open up this text file. Once the text file is open, you'll notice that it has a very specific format. It's very difficult to understand and edit the type catalog in Notepad. Instead, we'll import this into Microsoft Excel, which will give us a much better environment to view and create a type catalog. With Microsoft Excel running, select Open, click "Browse". In ensuring the open dialog box that we're viewing all files. Go ahead and select the text file 023 Type Catalog.txt. Click "Open". Excel now displays the Text Import Wizard dialog box. Here, we should ensure that we have delimited selected as this is a comma delimited file. Select Next. The file is delimited with columns, the default is tabs. We'll go ahead here and select Comma, and you'll now notice that each column is separated. Click "Next" and here the formatting is set to general and finally, we can select Finish. The data is now imported into an Excel file. We'll just zoom up on this data and start to expand some of our columns. At the top of each column we have formatting which tells Revit what the data holds. For example, here you can see we have structural material and this is currently set to other. If I take a look at a column that's holding our dimensional value such as pile length, you'll notice here that we've got pile length, then it's a length, and then the units of feet. The first column here is simply the family type name. I'm going to go ahead here and make some new family types. Here perhaps we'll have an 18-inch diameter. We'll instance this value here, and we'll pull down the pile number here. I'll just keep the pile number the same. For the length will set this to 18 feet. Pile diameter perhaps will now go to two feet. Embedment we'll leave at 0.5, and we can keep the description the same and also the default elevation. Now that we have this line created, we could continue to create new lines of information. When we're ready to save this, it's important that we save it as a comma separated file. To do this, select File, select Save As, in the file types be sure that you're selecting CSV comma delimited. Go ahead and select Save. Browse to the file location in Windows Explorer and ensure that Windows Explorer is set to Show File Extensions. You'll see here that we have our original text file and our CSV file. I'm going to delete the original text file, and I'm simply going to rename the CSV file to txt. We can then open that up in the Notepad text editor, and you'll now notice that it has the correct formatting. We can then test out new family in Revit by creating a new project. Here we'll create a new project and select Okay. On the structure ribbon select Isolated, on the context ribbon selects Load Family, and we now select our rfa file 023 type catalog. Go ahead and select Open. You will now be presented with a specified types dialog box. This is our catalog file. Here, we can select the family we want to load in and go ahead and select Okay. The family type is then created, and we can place it.