In AutoCAD you open a blank file and start drawing. Revit does not work that way. Every Revit project starts from a template, and that template quietly decides your units, the families you have to work with, your line styles, and how the whole project is organised, all before you place a single wall. So the first real skill is not drawing anything. It is starting the file correctly. Get this part wrong and you fight the settings for the rest of the project. Get it right and a lot of decisions are already made for you.
Starting a new project
Open Revit and you land on the Home screen. Under Models, click New. You can also go to the File tab, hover over New, and pick Project, or just press Ctrl+N. All three open the same dialog.
The New Project dialog asks two things. At the top is the Template file: the starting point your project is built from. Below it is Create new, with two options. Leave it on Project. The other option, Project template, is for building a template of your own, which is not what you want yet.
That template dropdown is the decision that matters, so it is worth understanding what a template actually is.
Templates, and which one to pick
A template is a Revit file with the extension .rte. Think of it as a project that someone already set up: the units are configured, a starter set of families is loaded, line styles and view organisation are in place, and often a few levels and views exist already. When you start a project from a template, your new file inherits all of that. It is the AutoCAD standards-and-title-block file, except it carries far more than a border.
Now the part that trips people following older tutorials. In Revit 2024 and later, the default template list changed. Instead of separate Architectural, Structural, and Mechanical templates, Revit now ships a single Multi-discipline template that combines them. If a tutorial from a few years ago tells you to pick the “Structural Template” from the dropdown, you may not see it there anymore.
The older discipline templates are still installed. To use one, click Browse in the New Project dialog and navigate to where Revit keeps them (on Windows, under ProgramData\Autodesk\RVT 2025\Templates and your language folder). For learning, the Multi-discipline template is a fine place to start. Everything is visible in one project, which helps while you are still finding your way around. A leaner, discipline-specific template makes more sense later, once you know what you would strip out.
There is one case where Revit asks about units directly. If you set the template to None to start from a genuinely blank file, Revit pops up a Select Initial Units dialog and asks you to choose Imperial or Metric before it opens. From any normal template that choice is already made, which is the next thing to check.
And the honest note: in a real office you will almost never pick a template from this list. Your company hands you its own .rte with the firm’s standards already built in, and you start from that. The out-of-box templates are for learning and the odd personal project. Knowing how this dialog works still matters, because the company template gets loaded through the same place.
Check your units before you model
Your units come from the template, but check them on day one anyway. Confirming them now is far less annoying than fixing them after you have modelled half a building. In India that means making sure length reads in millimetres, not feet and inches.
Open the Manage tab, find the Settings panel, and click Project Units. The keyboard shortcut UN opens the same dialog. Project Units lists each unit type by discipline: Length, Area, Volume, Angle, and so on. Click the value in the Format column for any of them to change how it displays, set the rounding, and choose whether to show the unit symbol.
Here is the mental shift from AutoCAD, and it is a big one. In AutoCAD you often treat units loosely and then scale drawings to suit. In Revit you always model at real size. A 3 metre wall is modelled as 3 metres, every time. Units here only control how that real measurement is displayed, not the size you draw at. There is no drawing-scale decision at the start of a Revit project, because scale belongs to the views and sheets later, not to the model.
Save the project properly
With the template chosen and units confirmed, save before you do anything else. Click Save on the Quick Access Toolbar, or press Ctrl+S, give the file a clear name, and put it somewhere you will find it again.
This is also the moment to learn Revit’s file extensions, because the three you will meet look alike and mean different things:
.rvtis a project. This is the file you just made and the one you work in every day..rteis a template, the kind you started from. Revit deliberately keeps the two apart: you cannot use Save As to turn a template straight into a project, or the other way round..rfais a family, a single reusable component like a door or a column that you load into a project.
Get those three straight now and a lot of later confusion disappears. When someone sends you an .rfa, you know it is a component to load, not a project to open.
One habit to build from day one: save often. Revit reminds you to save at intervals, and on a real model those reminders are not optional. Lost work in Revit hurts more than a lost DWG, because a model holds so much more than lines. On a team project you will later save into a shared central file instead of your own copy, but that is a worksharing topic for much later.
That is a project properly started: the right template chosen, units confirmed, file saved and named. None of it is drawing, and that is the point. Revit front-loads these decisions so the model behaves later. With the file open and set up, the next step is giving it structure, starting with levels.
If you are still weighing up whether the move into BIM is worth it, the civil engineer to BIM roadmap lays out the whole path, downsides included.