Quirkiness with Revit Titleblock Family

I recently ran into a very strange issue with printing sheets in one project. A user reported the sheet views have been blocked by some very large object stretch a mile or so while he was trying to print.

I look into the issue and it appears to be that giant thing or whatever it maybe comes from the titleblock family. After opening the family and it looks perfectly normal at first. However, I notice something quite unusual from the project browser.

There are wall types, curtain panel and mullions listed on the browser. Typically, the only thing that can be nested within titleblock family are 2D families like annotations. If you try to load/nest other 3D families and Revit would simply reject that. In this case, walls, curtain panel and mullion, which are system families, are impossible to come in to the titleblock anyway. They could only exist and be created in the project environment.

What I find it even harder to believe is Revit was able to show those elements that are in use by using "Select All Instance" from the type.

The thing is I can't even see these elements as the titleblock doesn't have a 3D view nor you can create one. All I could do is to delete them.

After I got rid of all the possible 3D elements, I was hoping to purge them out for good. I got another warning again about "Last type in system family cannot be deleted".

I have no choice but to leave the types in the titleblock and load it back to the project. This is definitely the first time I came across with this bug in titleblock family but at least it works now. All the sheets are back to "normal" and they print just fine.

I have no idea how the curtain wall and its sub component got into the family in the first place, but sure I will look out to this behavior in the future.

Shortcut to Your Project Template

The startup (aka Recent Files) page in Revit always have the default shortcut to the project template. In the past, Revit can only assign one project template at the time for using as a default template. Suppose your office has company standard project template when starting a new project, you can change the default path to access those templates. However, you could only set one template file only.

My office currently went through a process of updating the office standard templates, which consists of 3 major templates for different purposes. Since Revit 2013, you can add more than one template now and have direct access to those templates from the startup page.

Typical Project Template page

Here's what you have to do:
The first step is go to Revit "R" icon -> Options

Under Options -> File Locations, you can add more template by clicking the + icon, then browse through your network and find your company templates.

Once you have the template chosen, you can further arrange the order the template:

When all the setup is complete, you will now be able to find all your custom template from the startup page in Revit.