Revit - What's your favorite color?

I thought about this a few years ago teaching Revit Architecture to a group of young high school students. Yes, high school students are learning Revit. Most new users of Revit forget to select the object they want to modify. While it's not required, selecting the element(s) first displays a contextual tab that shows tools available to the designer. In addition, they forget they can double-click on the blue datum target to quickly jump to associated floor plan views.

To help students, I tell them their new favorite color when using Revit is blue. Whenever you want to modify an element, click on it and make it blue. If you need to change a dimension, select the object you want to modify so the dimension text turns blue and now you can change the dimension text value.

Blue is also the typical color of hyperlinks on webpages so clicking on a blue call out tag will take you to the matching view. If you want to jump to view, you can double-click on a visible datum, call out tag, building section, wall section and/or detail head.

However, when you hover over an element, its pre-selected color is also blue so students might think they don't have to click their mouse. So what if you can change the color of elements depending if they are pre-selected or selected? Well you can.
Click 4Options4Graphics tab. (Click image below to enlarge)

In the example above, simply hovering over a wall will make it green but once selected it turns red. Of course, if blue is your favorite color...
Mark Petrucci