Room tags play a crucial role in Revit documentation. It helps designers, architects, and contractors quickly understand and navigate a building’s spaces. In Revit, most users rely on the Tag All Not Tagged command to place room tags across an entire view. However, a frustrating Revit issue arises with Tag All mysteriously not working with rooms in a linked model. This is where manual tagging works just fine! Here’s what the problem looks like:

Let’s see why this happens and how to troubleshoot the problem. We’ll also see how to make Revit’s Tag All command work with live or linked rooms consistently.

Understanding Room Tags in Revit

Room tags are annotation elements in Revit that display information about rooms, such as their name, number, and area. These tags are crucial for documentation. They give construction and design teams clear, accurate information about spaces in a project.

Tagging rooms is usually straightforward. Revit offers the Tag Room tool under the Architecture tab, which lets users manually place tags. There’s also the Tag All Not Tagged command under the Annotate tab. It automates the process by tagging all available rooms at once. While these tools work seamlessly for rooms within the active model, things get tricky when dealing with linked models.

Tagging Linked Rooms in Revit

Revit allows users to tag rooms from a linked model but with a key limitation. Linked rooms can sometimes only be tagged manually using Tag Room. It works just fine as long as the room is visible in the view.

Users often expect that “Tag All Not Tagged” should also work for linked rooms. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Many Revit users have said Tag All not working with linked rooms, leaving rooms untagged without any clear explanation.

Why “Tag All Not Tagged” Skips Linked Rooms

Even more frustrating, Revit provides no warning or error message when Tag All refuses to tag linked rooms. Users can spend time troubleshooting, checking visibility settings, and even modifying filters. They only end up finding that nothing seems to fix the issue.

According to the Revit community, one common cause has emerged: the Underlay setting in the view properties. If a linked model is set as an Underlay, Revit’s “Tag All” will stop working with rooms inside that link.

This leads to inefficient workflows, as users are forced to disable the Underlay state of one or more links. They then need to run Tag All, and finally re-enable Underlay for all links previously modified. This is a tedious and time-consuming process, especially on large projects with lots of views that require new room tags.

Even worse, Revit links are often updated during the BIM coordination process. If there are new room layouts to tag, we would have to repeat the Underlay toggling trick. This quickly becomes tedious for a long list of views

A Smarter Solution: Tagitize

Instead of wrestling with Revit’s quirks, there’s a much better solution: Tagitize.

Tagitize is a powerful Revit plugin designed to streamline the tagging process of all Revit categories, including rooms. Tagitize seamlessly tags rooms both in the main model and Revit links, even if these links are set as Underlay. But that’s not all—it also solves one of the biggest pain points of Revit tagging: overlapping tags.

How Tagitize Works:

• Automatically tags both live and linked rooms in one or more views, without requiring manual intervention of Revit links’ properties.
• Cleverly arranges room tags to prevent overlapping other tags, annotations, or Revit elements in the view.
• Works in batch mode, allowing users to tag multiple views or sheets at once with the “Tag View/Sheet Set” command.
• Saves time and effort, reducing the need for manual placement and adjustments.

Tagitize also makes sure that new room tags don’t overlap other tags, annotations, or Revit elements in the view. Here’s the result you typically get from Revit’s Tag Room command (if it worked!)

It’s clear that many tags overlap existing elements, simply because Revit placed room tags at room location points. Now, let’s see what happens if we run Tagitize on the same view:

It’s definitely an improvement! Tagitize picked clearer tag positions and enabled leader lines for room tags that had no suitable position inside host rooms. This helps you avoid spending time manually adjusting tag locations.

Why Choose Tagitize Over Revit’s Built-in Tagging Tools?

1. Reliability – Unlike “Tag All,” Tagitize doesn’t fail on linked rooms. It guarantees that all rooms—live or linked—are properly tagged.
2. Smart Tag Placement – No more manual repositioning to avoid overlapping tags. Tagitize places tags intelligently to ensure readability.
3. Batch Processing – With its “Tag View/Sheet Set” feature, you can tag multiple views at once. Say goodbye to running the Tag All command manually for each view!
4. Improved Workflow Efficiency – Less time spent troubleshooting tagging issues means more time for design and documentation.

A Manual Fix: Adjusting the Underlay Setting

If you still prefer to stick with Revit’s built-in tools, you can try this manual workaround:

1. Open Visibility Properties of the Revit view.
2. Locate the Underlay setting for the link containing rooms you need to tag.
3. Set Underlay to False.
4. Run “Tag All Not Tagged”. It should now tag the linked rooms.

While this workaround helps in some cases, it’s far from a perfect solution. You’ll still have to deal with potential tag overlap issues. You also must repeat the process for each affected view and each Revit link.

Need to Tag All Revit rooms quickly? Use Tagitize.

At the end of the day, adjusting the Underlay setting is a band-aid fix. If you want a fast, reliable, and intelligent solution, Tagitize is the way to go.

Unlike the manual workaround, Tagitize works regardless of Underlay settings, prevents tag overlaps, and allows you to batch-process multiple views in one go.

If you’re ready to take control of your room-tagging workflow and stop wasting time on frustrating Revit limitations, download Tagitize today and try it for free.