The sheets that matter
COBie is a multi-tab workbook. Most of the asset register lives in a handful of core sheets, each a level of the building broken down further than the last:
- Facility
- One row: the building itself.
- Floor
- Every level in the facility.
- Space
- Every room, mapped to its floor.
- Type
- The product types: a model of pump, a kind of door.
- Component
- Each physical instance of a type, placed in a space.
- System
- Components grouped by the service they provide together.
Who asks for it
COBie came out of the US Army Corps of Engineers as a handover standard and was folded into the National BIM Standard-United States. In the UK it is the government's chosen handover schema, originally under BIM Level 2 and now within the ISO 19650 information-management framework. The common thread is the same: an owner wants their maintenance system populated accurately the day the project closes out.
2.4, 3.0, and which one you owe
COBie 2.4 was published with NBIMS-US V3 in 2015. COBie 3.0 followed with NBIMS-US V4 in 2023 and introduced revised fields and JSON support. cobiereport produces a 2.4 workbook draft. Confirm the required version with your project team before preparing the deliverable.
What format it ships in
COBie is legitimately delivered as a spreadsheet (.xlsx), as STEP-Part 21 (.ifc), or as ifcXML. The spreadsheet is the form most owners actually read, which is why a tool that hands you a clean, reviewable workbook (rather than another IFC) saves an argument at handover.