Revit 2017 – Importing vs Linking CAD Files

By John Flanagan

On training courses I frequently get asked questions about importing and linking files into Revit. The following blog outlines the pros and cons for importing versus linking vector data into Revit and how you can modify the inserted data.

You can insert CAD data into the Revit environment in two ways: importing and linking. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.

Linking versus Importing

You can reuse vector data in a project in the following two ways

Modifying Inserted CAD Data 

Once you have CAD data imported or linked into a Revit project, you have several ways of manipulating the data to suit your needs:

When you select an imported/linked file, you can modify it by arranging the Foreground/Background status, modifying its Type Properties, querying information about elements in the file, deleting/hiding layers, and for imported files only, exploding the file. You can also modify the Visibility/Graphics of each imported/linked instance.

• An imported/linked file is called an Import Symbol once it is inserted into a project.

Linking a CAD file is a physical link – so that should the file change you can reload the CAD file and it will update accordingly. 

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