Despite being in version 2013, Revit still carries within it some quite unbelievably weak features (or lack of functional ones). Classic examples of these quirks with schedules are:

• No "Family and Type" parameter in "Filter by": despite you can specify the parameter(s) "family and type" name(s) in the available fields, and despite you can actually sort by this (or these) parameter(s), they do not show up in the "filter by" drop down menu, under the "Filter" tab. I cannot think of any reason why these parameters should not be available here as well.
• No worksets are available in scheduling: you can specify options and phases in which Revit should schedule elements, but you cannot specify Worksets. This means that you can create a schedule that lists elements actually hidden by a custom workset visibility. For example, elements placed on a temporary workset which is normally turned off in most views will show in the schedule.
• Only one Phase at a time, if you are showing room information: interestingly enough, you can indeed specify a phase to be scheduled, but not a phase range if you want to show rooms information. Assuming a project has 6 phases, from "Phase 1" till "Phase 6" (in the future), this limitation means that you can schedule all sinks in "phase 2" and display their rooms, but there is no way see the rooms of all sink created from "phase 4" to "phase 6". In other words, you must create one schedule for each phase, if you need to see the room the elements belong to. This must be because rooms them self can only belong to one phase (cannot be demolished...).

Once again, if you know of any work around, or if you have any philosophical take on these which to me appear to be inexplicable limitations of the software, by all means, please comment away.

I have to work on a casework schedule to extract some information about cabinets and the rooms in which they are placed.  If creating a new schedule and performing such task should be pretty straightforward, the team is now working on a half gig (yes GIG) model, and we have one hundred schedules in the browser. This dictates that before we create any new views, we should scavenge the (huge) model for already existing ones.

And here is the problem, because I did find a casework schedule (thanks also to the new search browser feature), but I do not know if it is placed on any sheet, or if it is a working schedule that can be modified without any existing sheet being modified. And no, "go check" is not a viable answer, because the browser also contains hundreds of sheets, grouped in dozen custom groups. So looking for the sheet where a particular schedule might have been placed is simply not feasible.

Organizing the browser to filter out the "not on sheets" parameter works only on regular views, which is bad because Revit thought us that schedules are actually like any other graphic view of the data-set, that is, like floor plans or elevations, they are "sections" cut out of the same database of the 3D model. Yet, they are listed outside the "views" browser item and they seems to have less "rights" than other views.

By the way, Legends seem to have similar limitations, in the sense that they cannot be screened out by "Not on sheet" and if you right click on a legend name, the menu item "Select all instances in view / entire project" is always grayed out. Why can't we at least know how many instances of a particular legend or schedule exist in the project is not clear at this point. This seems to be just an oversight.

If anyone has any idea how to achieve this, please do post a reply. In the meanwhile, not to take any chance, I will have to create a new schedule.

Many times 3D families have 2D elements drafted in them. For example, door families have the swing drafted in in plan view as a symbolic line (arc). Many other examples apply.
However, there are some dangers in using nested 2D families within your 3D family: the nested 2D family must be a detail, and not an annotation! See the video below for an exhaustive example: