Autodesk has released an extension for getting more information out of Rooms in Revit Architecture 2011. The Roombook Extension was made available to Revit Architecture subscription members on December 9, 2010. According to Autodesk, the extension “helps calculate the surface area of walls, floors and ceiling elements, room circumferences and the total number of furnishing elements within a project”. This is a nice utility to get quantities for room-specific information that exists in the model and is valuable for quantity takeoff analysis.
After installing the extension, the following panel will appear on your “Add-Ins” tab of Revit Architecture 2011:
The extension gives you the ability to specify various analysis settings and add materials that can be used for Rooms. Once you configure the settings, you just need to select the “Calculate Room Quantities” function.
After selecting the rooms to be analyzed and then running the Calculate function, you can then review the results in a dialog box. The Roombook Extension – Room Quantities dialog box has an option to display all of the individual element listings (by room) for the following items:
• Wall Surfaces
• Floor Surfaces
• Ceiling Surfaces
• Room Circumferences
• Furniture Elements
As an example, when selecting “Furniture Elements”, Revit will list each individual piece of furniture in each room by the family and type name along with the quantity of each one. This allows you to know exactly how many items you have in your project and what rooms they are in.
When selecting the “Wall Surfaces” option, it lists each wall in/around each room. It lists the wall type along with the following information:
• The materials that make up the wall type’s structure
• Area of the wall
• Height of the wall
• Total area for all walls
• Sub area for each door, window, etc that are hosted in the wall
A nice aspect is the ability to add materials to specific walls in a room. You can add paint, tile, wallpaper, etc to a wall being analyzed without needing to modify the actual Revit wall family type structure. I like the ability to be able to add that information without needing additional wall types to accomplish it.
A really nice part of the extension is the ability to export the results to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The included default template provides a nice spreadsheet listing all of the desired information on a per room basis, along with totals for each category and totals for each wall material. In addition to Excel and CSV file formats, you can export to a DWF file which can be used by Autodesk Quantity Takeoff.
The following is an example of the Excel spreadsheet output based upon analysis of a single room:
You may want to create new views for performing the “Calculate Room Quantities” function. When you run the function, annotation tags are added to the Revit model for each item that is evaluated by the extension. You can choose to hide or show these Quantity ID tags on a project-wide basis via the panel on the ribbon. The Quantity ID tags are element specific, so you will have many of these in a project.
A pitfall of the extension is that the Furniture Systems category is not currently included in the process, although Furniture is included. Hopefully Furniture Systems will be added in the future.
It appears that the extension was developed for the German market, but has been adapted for those of us not in Germany. That is a good thing.
The Roombook Extension can be downloaded from the Autodesk Subscription website for subscription members. I personally believe that it is a nice benefit to being a subscription member.
Applying Technology to Architecture 
Can Roombook read families in a linked model within the room boundary, e.g. MEP objects?
The Roombook Extension is limited in the information that is analyzed. MEP objects are not analyzed regardless of whether they are in a linked file or in the file being analyzed.
I have not yet been able to get the Roombook extension to read any information of any type contained in a linked file.