The panel, tab by tab

Nearly everything STING Tools does happens in one panel docked to the right-hand side of Revit. This guide walks through all ten tabs so you know what each is for and when you would reach for it.

Why a panel and not just a ribbon

Revit's ribbon is designed for commands you run once — draw a wall, place a door. It hides everything not on the current tab, and it resets as you move around the model.

Most coordination work isn't like that. Tagging a floor, checking what you have tagged, fixing what failed, then tagging again is a loop you run for an hour at a time. A docked panel stays open beside the model while you work, keeps its settings between commands, and shows results without covering the drawing.

The ribbon tab is still there for the handful of commands you run occasionally. The panel is where the day's work happens.

The ten tabs at a glance

SELECT — choosing what to work on

Every batch operation starts with a selection. Revit's own selection tools are either too broad (everything in the view) or too slow (clicking 400 light fittings one at a time).

The discipline buttons are the ones you will use most. They are abbreviated to fit: Lgt for lighting fixtures, Elc for electrical, Mch for mechanical, Plb for plumbing, Air for air terminals, Fur for furniture. One click selects every element of that discipline in the current view.

Above them sit the pattern-based tools, for when "all lighting" is too blunt:

• Similar — everything matching what you already have selected
• Chain — follows a connected run of pipe, duct or conduit from end to end
• Cluster — elements grouped tightly together, such as a plant room
• Boundary — everything inside a room or area you pick
• Outliers — elements sitting oddly far from their neighbours, which is often how you find something modelled in the wrong place
• Dense — the congested spots, useful before a coordination review

TAGGING — putting identity on elements

A tag is the label that tells everyone downstream what a thing is: which discipline owns it, where it sits, what system it belongs to, and its unique number. Getting these consistent across a model is what makes schedules, handover data and clash reports trustworthy.

Doing it by hand does not scale. A mid-size hospital floor can carry several thousand taggable elements, and each tag has several parts that must agree with each other.

The main buttons, in the order you would normally use them:

• Pre-Audit — a dry run. Shows what would be tagged and flags problems before anything changes. Worth running first on an unfamiliar model.
• Auto Tag — tags everything in the current view
• Batch Tag — tags across the whole project rather than one view
• Tag New — only elements added since the last run, for keeping a live model current
• Tag+Combine — tags and assembles the combined text in one pass
• Undo — reverses the last tagging run

Smart Organise handles the other half of the job: tags that exist but sit badly — overlapping each other, covering the geometry, or trailing leaders across the sheet. Quick does a fast pass, Deep works harder at difficult areas, and Anneal keeps rearranging until it settles on the least-crowded arrangement it can find. Deep and Anneal take longer; use them before issuing a drawing rather than mid-session.

The colour controls tint elements by discipline or by any parameter value, which makes a wrong value obvious at a glance instead of buried in a schedule.

SETUP — preparing a project

This is the tab you use once at the start and rarely afterwards.

Project Setup Wizard is the recommended route: it walks through the whole preparation in order rather than leaving you to guess. Behind it sit the individual steps for when you need just one.

The materials libraries are worth knowing about — BLE carries 815 building-element materials and MEP 464 mechanical and electrical ones, each already carrying the properties that schedules and cost plans expect. Loading these is usually faster than building materials by hand and gives everyone on the project the same definitions.

Params Check verifies that the shared parameters STING relies on are present and correctly bound. If tagging behaves strangely on an inherited model, run this first.

DOCS — laying out sheets

Sheet composition is fiddly, repetitive work: nudging viewports until they line up, then renumbering everything when a drawing is inserted in the middle of a set.

The alignment buttons work on a selection of viewports — align their tops, bottoms, left edges, or centre them on a shared axis. L→R and T→B distribute them evenly left-to-right or top-to-bottom.

The renumbering tools handle the other half: +1 and -1 shift a run of numbers up or down to make room, and Prefix and Suffix add or change a common part of a sheet number across a set.

CREATE TAGS — the tag families themselves

Tags are Revit families, and they have to exist before anything can be tagged with them. Most firms either inherit a mismatched set or build them one at a time.

Create Tag Fams builds the families to a consistent specification. Load Params brings in the shared parameters they depend on, and Cfg Labels sets what each label actually displays. Purge clears out unused tag families that accumulate in a long-running project.

You are unlikely to visit this tab often, but when a tag will not display what you expect, this is where the cause usually is.

MODEL — geometry and model-wide checks

Two different kinds of tool share this tab.

The creation tools build geometry from rules rather than by drawing: Building Shell generates walls, floor and roof for a footprint; Room Seed places rooms; Levels+Grids sets out the structural framework; DWG Wizard converts an imported CAD drawing into Revit elements.

Placement Centre is the larger of these — a separate window for placing fixtures according to rules, such as spacing light fittings on a grid or setting sockets at standard heights.

The audit tools check the model as a whole: LOD Check tests whether elements carry the level of detail the current stage requires, Family Audit reviews the families in use, and Federation Review looks across linked models rather than just the one you have open.

BIM — coordination

Coordination is the business of finding where disciplines disagree and tracking those disagreements to resolution.

Detect runs a clash check. Run X-Model extends it across linked models, which is where most real conflicts live — your ducts against someone else's beams. Refresh Matrix updates which discipline pairs are being checked against each other.

BCF exports findings in the standard format that Navisworks, Solibri and most coordination tools can open, so an issue raised here arrives intact in the software the rest of the team uses.

The Warnings Dashboard addresses a different problem: Revit's own warning list, which on an inherited model can run to thousands of entries that nobody has read in months. It groups warnings by type and severity so you can see which few actually matter, and Auto-Fix resolves the mechanical ones.

TAG STUDIO — how tags look

The TAGGING tab decides what gets tagged. Tag Studio decides how those tags appear — and it has grown to carry the deeper design tools as well. It has thirteen sub-tabs. The first five are the ones you will touch most:

• Placement — where a tag sits relative to its element, and how hard to work at avoiding overlaps
• Leader & Elbow — the line joining tag to element: straight or elbowed, and which arrowhead
• Style & Color — text size, weight, colour, and whether tags carry a box
• Tokens & Depth — which parts of the tag are shown. A busy plan might show only discipline and number; a coordination view might show everything
• Categories — which element categories get tagged at all, and which are excluded

The remaining eight go beyond appearance:

• Tools — housekeeping: repair and validation passes, exports, and tag schedules
• Scale — how tags adapt when the view scale changes, so a 1:200 plan is not drowned in text sized for 1:50
• Automation — rule-driven helpers that create and check elements by discipline: stairs and railings, reinforcement, wind and seismic loads, equipment sizing
• Standards — calculators and reference notes for the standards those checks are built on
• MEP — auto-sizing for ducts, pipes and conduit, with the reference standards alongside
• Fabrication — settings for producing shop drawings: what to include, which rules to apply, and how the output is titled
• Routing — quick routing actions: drop connections from fixtures to the nearest run, check how full the containment is, place hangers
• Fixtures — quick placement: fixtures by rule, toilet-room layouts, lighting grids

These settings are why the same model can produce a clean tender drawing and a dense coordination drawing without re-tagging anything.

INTEROP — getting data in and out

A model is only useful if its information can leave it in a form other people can use. INTEROP collects everything that moves data between Revit and the rest of the world.

The Excel tools are where most people start. Export writes element data to a spreadsheet anyone can edit; Import brings the edited values back with checks; and Round Trip does both in one pass — export, hand the file to whoever needs to fill it in, and read it back when it returns. The same round-trip works for whole schedules.

The batch exports produce the deliverable files: PDF for sheet sets, DWG for consultants who work in CAD, NWC for Navisworks review models, and IFC for anyone on other software. IFC works in both directions — a model from ArchiCAD or any other authoring tool can be imported with its properties intact.

The publishing tools send packages to whichever platform the project runs on — ACC/BIM 360, Procore, Trimble Connect, Aconex, ProjectWise or SharePoint — and BCF carries issues in and out in the format the coordination tools share. Also here: COBie handover data, sticky notes you can pin to elements and track to closure, team worksharing and backups, and a model explorer for hunting down unused families and stray CAD imports.

HEALTHCARE — hospital and clinic checks

Healthcare buildings carry rules ordinary projects never meet: isolation rooms must hold a pressure difference to the corridor, medical gas must reach every bed, imaging rooms need lead in the walls, and mental-health areas must avoid fittings a patient could use for self-harm. This tab checks the model against those rules.

Start by picking the facility type at the top — acute, community, dental, imaging-only or mental health — because that decides which checks apply. A dental practice is not audited for operating theatres.

It has six sub-tabs:

• Validators — the check list. Tick what you want — room pressure, medical gas, water safety, radiation shielding, anti-ligature, department adjacency and more — and run them together for one pass/fail picture.
• MGPS — medical gas: audits the pipework gas by gas (oxygen, medical air, vacuum and the rest) and walks the formal verification steps.
• Radiation — works out how much lead a wall needs for an X-ray, CT or radiotherapy room, compares it with what the wall provides, and audits MRI zoning.
• Rooms / RDS — room data sheets: issue the per-room specification documents and check their completeness.
• Specialist — audits for the unusual departments: hybrid operating rooms, pharmacy clean rooms, behavioural health, mortuary, maternity, dialysis.
• Workflows — preset sequences that chain the checks together for commissioning and recurring audits.

On a non-healthcare project you will never open this tab, and that is fine.

The discipline panels — HVAC, Electrical, Plumbing

Mechanical, electrical and plumbing design each need more room than one tab can give, so each has its own separate panel with its own set of tabs. They are not tabs on the main panel — they open from the ribbon: on the STING Tools ribbon tab, the STING Panels group has a button for each.

• HVAC — equipment, systems, calculations, duct sizing, heat loads, fabrication and reports
• Electrical — distribution boards, circuits, calculations, cable sizing, single-line diagrams and lighting
• Plumbing — supply and drainage sizing, routing, storm water, audits and documentation

Each has its own guide, covering the engineering behind the numbers as well as the buttons.

A sensible first hour

1. Open a project you know well — not a live deadline.
2. SETUP › Params Check, to confirm the model is ready.
3. SELECT › Lgt, to select the lighting in the current view.
4. TAGGING › Pre-Audit, and read what it says it would do.
5. If it looks right, Auto Tag. If it doesn't, nothing has changed yet.
6. Undo if you want the model back exactly as it was.

That loop — select, audit, tag, check — is the core of how STING is meant to be used. Everything else builds on it.