When I first came back to working in Revit, I wasn’t convinced of the need to separate “working” views from “plotting” views. I’d never used them in AutoCAD, why start now? Can’t you just hide stuff you don’t need?
Gotta say, though, I became a fan pretty quickly. What changed my mind?
Working Sections
When you’re working in 3D, a 2D view doesn’t always tell the whole story. (Or even half the story.) Want to see what’s really going on in your plan? Cut a section! Didn’t quite answer the question? Cut another section! Before you know it, your view is chock full of section cuts that you don’t actually need as part of your set.
Rather than letting section cuts clutter up your views, at our office we change them to a “working section” type and use a filter to turn them off in plotted views. We’ve found it helps eliminate confusion between what’s a “real” section and what’s not.
“Real” (a.k.a. plotting) section
“Working” section
Temporary Annotations
I was modeling an existing structure the other day, and I needed to keep track of the top of caisson elevations. The easiest way to do this was to tag them all with spot elevations — but I did not want that information on the actual plan. Instead, I hopped over into the working view and tagged away.
They didn’t have to look pretty, because they’ll never appear on paper. I like to think of working views as the digital equivalent of scratch paper. You can scribble all you want, knowing you won’t mess up your sheet. And if you decide later that you do need some of those annotations or sections on the plotting sheet, you can easily copy the annotations or change the section back to a regular type.
Watch out for real objects
The one caveat I would give for working views is that if you change something real, like a wall or a door, you’d better go back and check that in your plotting view to make sure it still looks the way you want it to. Real annotations such as dimensions and spot elevations should follow their hosts, but detail components might not and text notes definitely won’t.
BIMmuse 
Do you recommend working annotation types over working views? If not, in what situation would you recommend working views instead of working annotation?
I think I prefer the separation of views over the proliferation of types. If you have a working annotation type, you’ll be constantly turning it on and off, and you might forget to turn it off when you need to. Or you might mix your types up when adding notes, and have to go back and fix them. With working views, your annotations stay safely corralled, and your view can be as cluttered as much as you like without worrying about it affecting your plots. The exception to this is with section cuts and other objects that show up in all related views, whether you need them to or not. In that case, a working type is helpful, so you can apply a filter to control the visibility.
But if you have an example where you’ve used working annotations, I’d be happy to post it.
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How do you get the text to remain aligned to the Section Arrow for your Working Section Heads?
It’s part of the section marker family — a custom family we use for the Working section type.
not really the answer to the question. But through enough diligence and perseverance I was able to get the text ‘WORKING’ to rotate and read properly in my variation of the ‘Working Section Head’. If I put just the text working it would remain horizontal. I had to embed a generic annotation family w/ the text “WORKING’ into my Section head Family and voila it worked.
Sorry, you’re right. I should have been more specific. That text is indeed a “generic annotation” in our Section Mark family.
Hey there, I’m curious how you decide when to create a working view. Is it on an as-needed basis? Or do you create a working view to correspond to every floor plan/ceiling plan by default? Do you separate working views by the user that created them (add user’s initials to view name) so that each designer can have their own “sandbox”? Not sure if these comments are still being monitored, but thought I’d ask just in case.
The blog is not quite dead yet! 🙂
I like to create working views for every plan. Working sections are created as-needed, and honestly tend to proliferate past the point of usefulness. We don’t add initials to generally, but we probably should–then we could do periodic clean-outs of any sections without initials.