Empty System Panel is Missing

So, it turns out the curtain panel 'Empty System Panel' family has been missing from most of the default Revit templates since at least 2017.

This thread has tracked the problem for the last few years.

If you are not familiar with this important system family, it allows you to create curtain wall screens, (no glass between mullions) such as the one below.

However, whilst these two screen appear the same, only one of them can manipulate it's shape or attach to slope roofs. 

You see, to make things nice and confusing, there is an 'Empty Panel' loadable family available in the default library that comes with your Revit installation. However, it is a LOADABLE family, not a SYSTEM family. The system family comes with special powers that allows its shape to be manipulated. Anyone who has ever tried to attach a curtain wall with custom panels to a slope roof before, or has come across this empty panel problem, will likely have encountered this error message:

The beauty of the system Solid, Glazed & Empty panels, is they allow for this manipulation without throwing up this warning. 

Finally, being a system family, it isn't loadable, just like walls, floors, roofs and ceilings to name a few. Therefore, the only way to get this into your project should you need it, is to copy and paste a curtain wall that uses the empty system panel family into your project. For some, this may not be so easy if you don't have a copy of a pre 2017 template lying around.

I by chance had one on file and have saved this to a blank template which now lives in one of my cloud storage drives so I will ALWAYS have it on hand if when I need it. 

Hopefully Autodesk take my problem report I logged today seriously enough to fix the next release template. 

'Walls' Category for Revit Component Family

You may already know, that as a component family, the 'wall' category isn't actually available, so usually in these circumstances, I will go with a generic model family and create a subcategory or if I really need to, settle for an in-place family.

I came across THIS nice little post from 'What Revit Wants' recently as another alternative and so far it appears to works nicely.
In summary, Luke walks you through a method of saving an in-place family (which allows us to select 'walls' as a category) and save it as an RFA file.

I haven't really found a strong use case for this yet, but we'll file it under 'tips & tricks'.

Revit Schedules - How to Format Headers

*This post is also in video format, scroll down to view. 
I see this question occasionally in forums, "How do I format the headers in a Revit schedule?" to which the reply is often along the lines of, "you can't". 

Recently I was playing around with formatting schedules and discovered that you actually can have two different text styles between the headers and body text. 

Above Image: Header turned on uses the same text style as the Body text

Definitions

Before we begin we must clarify the difference between Header & Header Text. 

The header text, found in the Appearance tab of the schedule settings, we can control by simply setting the text style.

The header is what we can turn on in the Sorting/Grouping tab. It is this header that users often want to change because it is often used as a sub-header to help sort the body of data in the schedule. As you can see in the image above, there is no option to set this text style.

The problem is the header font style comes from the font style set for Body Text. Therefore it appears we can't have two separate text styles between the headers and body text. 

Method

The idea is simple, in schedules you can override all text from the Appearance tab except headers. We have had this ability for a few versions now and we can use this valuable nugget of information to help us create the schedule appearance we want. 

1. Since we can't override headers, we will set the text style of the headers we want through the appearance tab on the schedule settings. To do so, set the body text to what you want your header text to look like. 

2. Now, in your schedule we need to override the body text. Select the columns and click Font from the contextual ribbon to override the whole schedule with what you would like your body text to be. 

3. Finally, selecting only the header text cells, override the font formatting to what you would like for your header text, or you can simply hit Reset to take on the text style set in the schedule appearance tab. 

All done, check your schedule on the sheet, you will notice all the format overriding has not effected the header style you set earlier in the appearance tab. 

Completed sample sheet list with font style overrides

If you are still unsure, I have created a video to demonstrate the above procedure. 

Yes, this is a workaround and it does mean that your body text styles won't be set in the appearance settings, so this may effect your view template standards if you use them for schedules. If you use the Blank Line option from the Sorting/Grouping tab, you will also notice the height of this space increases if your header style is larger.