Workset Overview

A workset is a collection of elements, such as walls, doors, floors, or stairs.

A workset is a collection of elements, such as ducts, air terminal, or air handlers.

The important distinction when working with ownership of objects in a workset is between making a workset editable and borrowing from a workset.

When you make a workset editable in Revit, you are taking exclusive ownership of all objects in it. Only one user can exclusively edit each workset at a given time. All team members can view worksets owned by other team members, but they cannot always make changes to them. This restriction prevents potential conflicts within the project.

It is possible to borrow an element from a workset that you do not own. For more information, see Borrowing Elements.

Worksets and Element Borrowing

Generally, it is recommended that you work in your local copy of the central model and not make worksets editable. When you edit an element that is not being edited by another team member, you automatically become the borrower of the element and can make the changes you need. It is recommended that you synchronize with central frequently as you work. Synchronizing relinquishes borrowed elements by default, allowing other team members to edit them.

Use worksets when you want to reserve parts of a project so that only the assigned user can edit the elements in that workset. Also consider these benefits for creating worksets:

• Convenience for editing: dividing a project into worksets makes it easier to make whole sections of a project editable at once.
• Visibility control: You can control overall visibility in a project when you link Revit models into other Revit projects. For example, it is often convenient to turn off visibility of the Shared Levels and Grids workset when linking Revit models so that you do not have to turn off levels and grids individually in each view.