Revit 2017 - No points were found in the file error

By Dennis Collin

No points were found in the file error

I recently had an problem reported when a user received an error message "No points found" , when importing survey 'CSV' data to a Revit Topographic Surface

This can often be the data either has unexpected breaks in fields or a not recognised separator character to sort the eastings, northings and height. In the image above we see spaces and a semi-colon separator character which Revit doesn't like.

The corrected format with comma separated values (CSV) and no spaces. Data after the X, Y and Z fields are ignored by Revit (survey codes and references etc.)

This is easy to fix with a Find and replace function to remove these characters and replace with just a comma character which is what Revit expects. You could also import the file into MS Excel and convert to a suitable format which is covered in a blog posted a little while back here.

https://www.cadlinecommunity.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/201910831-Distorted-Topographic-Surfaces-in-Revit-2015

Once the separator has been corrected and the spaces removed the point data imports fine.