Worksets and Worksharing: What to Understand Before You Enable It

Worksharing is what lets several people work in the same Revit model without their changes silently overwriting each other. It’s not on by default — Revit assumes a single-user project until you turn it on.

What a workset actually is

A workset is a named group of building elements used to manage ownership and responsibility across a design team — typical examples are Building Shell, Core, or Interiors. Once worksharing is enabled, every element in the project belongs to exactly one workset, and only the person who owns (has permission over) a workset’s elements can freely edit them.

Enabling it creates two worksets automatically

The moment you turn on worksharing (Collaborate tab, choose network or cloud, then Worksets), Revit creates two worksets for you before you’ve defined anything:

• Shared Levels And Grids — every level and grid already in the project gets assigned here automatically.
• Workset1 — everything else in the model lands here by default.

You can rename both. But don’t rename Workset1 expecting to retire it: it’s the default system workset, and it can never be deleted — even after you’ve renamed it and moved every element out. Plan your naming convention around this instead of fighting it.

The four workset types

Beyond the two Revit creates for you, there are four categories:

1. User-created — everything you add yourself in the Worksets dialog. All building elements, spaces, and datum objects placed in the project get assigned to one of these (or to Workset1 if you haven’t reassigned them).
2. Families — Revit auto-creates one per loaded family. Editing a family’s properties automatically takes ownership of that family’s workset — worth knowing before you wonder why you suddenly “own” something.
3. Project standards — system-managed, not something you organize elements into directly.
4. Views — same, system-managed per view.

Only elements in user-created worksets can be moved to other user-created worksets — you can’t drag a level out of Shared Levels And Grids into a custom workset the same way.

What happens on enable

Turning on worksharing for the first time can take a few minutes on a large model — Revit is restructuring the file, not just flipping a setting. Depending on model size and machine speed, budget for that delay rather than assuming something’s frozen.

Common mistake

Renaming Workset1 to something tidy like Unassigned or zz-Old, then trying to delete it once everything’s been reassigned. It will still be there — Revit keeps it as the default system workset permanently, whatever you call it. Once you’ve got this fundamental down, our workset naming convention for MEP coordination covers what to actually name the worksets you create yourself.