1,096 Clicks to Set Units in Revit - Or a Few With the Right Tool

There are 137 unit types in the Revit UI (Revit 2026). Changing a single one takes at least 8 clicks. Do the math and you get 1,096 clicks to set all units in one Revit file, whether it’s a project, a family or a template.

Nobody does that. And that’s exactly the problem.

The real pain: imperial to metric

Imagine you have to properly convert a project file from imperial to metric, together with all its families, including every level of nesting.

Most people change a few units that obviously matter - Length, Diameter, Area, Mass and similar - and leave the rest as they are. I did that too for years. I never liked it, and even the partial version was tedious, repetitive and error-prone work. Every family opened, every dialog clicked through, every format checked again.

The result is a model where some units are metric, some are still imperial, and nobody really knows which ones until a schedule, a tag or a parameter shows the wrong value.

Why a units standard is so hard to keep

You can try to solve this with templates, and templates do help for new files. But they don’t help with:

• existing projects you inherit from other teams or other markets
• families downloaded from manufacturers or created from other templates
• keeping projects and families aligned with the same standard over time

Revit simply has no feature for managing units as a standard and moving them between files. So a company or project units standard ends up living in a PDF that people are supposed to follow by hand, 8 clicks at a time.

One tool, one JSON file

So I finally built a tool that does the whole job in a few clicks. Watch the sample workflow on YouTube: Revit units export, import and metric/imperial conversion

What happens in the video:

1. Units are exported to JSON from a Revit 2026 project and loaded into Revit 2024. Yes, from a higher to a lower Revit version, which is something native Revit tools usually don’t allow.
2. A new family is created from our company’s imperial Generic Model template and switched to metric in seconds using the quick Metric and Imperial buttons. These apply the same defaults you get when you start a new project with <None> as the template.

The same tool and the same JSON file work in both projects and families.

What this means for a team

Once units live in a JSON file, they become a real standard instead of a guideline:

• Keep one units file per company, client or project standard
• Apply it to any project, family or template you open
• Move it between Revit versions without rebuilding anything
• Switch between metric and imperial defaults in one click when a file comes from another market

No more half-converted models, no more guessing which units were left behind.

Try it

The tool is part of Via BIM Tools, available at apps.viabim.co, with a 30-day free trial.

Is it just me?

Half-set units bug me, even when they don’t affect anything visible. Maybe it’s just me.

How does your team keep units consistent across files - with templates, by hand, or not at all?