This story was originally published BY MIKE LANDERS on the Bluebeam Blog.

Deepak Maini, a 20-year qualified mechanical engineer, shares tips and tricks for using QTO software (From 2019)

Watch the video here.

Upon buying a home many years ago, a homeowner provided the contractor with a PDF for wooden flooring installation. The contractor vowed to take off the quantities, but also required a home visit so they could do an onsite measurement check as well.

Baffled, the homeowner questioned the firm as to why the home visit was needed. The explanation: “You’ll see when we get there.”

The firm measured on-site and found out that its takeoffs were 22% more than the initial estimate.

“I realized that they didn’t have the right tools,” the homeowner said. “Had I known about Revu back then, I would have told them, ‘You are not only wasting your time, you’re also wasting my time. If you use this tool, you’ll be a lot more accurate.’”

That homeowner was Deepak Maini, a 20-year qualified mechanical engineer who not only knows about Bluebeam Revu now, but swears by it for accurate quantity takeoffs.

Now a national technical manager at Cadgroup Australia, Deepak strongly advocates for the use of Revu to accomplish accurate quantity takeoffs. Using the digital tools in Revu helps to avoid costly mistakes from paper-generated processes, especially when dealing with large or complex projects.

Deepak’s QTO Tips and Tricks in Revu

• Calibrate the PDF – Don’t rely on the drawings to be in proper scale. This process ensures that your measurements are accurate.
• Create Custom tool sets – Align all project collaborators by creating and deploying a tool set for takeoffs that can be used and standardized throughout your company and on future projects.
• Use Custom Columns – Why not have an immediate cost breakdown? Columns in the Markups List are highly customizable. With values plugged into your Custom Columns, users can instantly see the materials and price estimates.
• Use VisualSearch – Using this feature, you can find the total count of light fixtures or electrical outlets quickly within your entire bid package by using Revu to search for a visual cue or object.

Calibrate the PDF

“You don’t always know whether those sheets have been printed to the right scale or not,” Deepak said. “Calibration ensures that we use the right scale and we get the right measurements.”

Revu includes automatic prompts for setting scale and can calibrate a PDF to a single scale or to separate X and Y scales as needed, as well as setting multiple measurement scales on the same PDF using viewports. “When it comes to taking off regions and areas and so on, it’s got some really smart tools that let you snap onto the corner points of the areas and you can really easily take off those quantities,” Deepak added.

Custom tool sets

Taking off building quantities can be a repetitive process, and if you have multiple people working on several bid packages at once, having a standard set of tools makes work consistent and efficient among everyone. Markups, like colored hatch patterns, and symbols, like lighting fixtures, can be saved as a custom tool set in Revu and even shared with other users.

This story was originally published BY FRANK KALMAN on the Bluebeam Blog.

Cities and municipalities transitioning their plan check process from paper to digital have a lot to look forward to.

Moving the paper-based process of reviewing and approving plan documents for local-area building projects can improve your efficiency in the digital era. But that doesn’t mean making the transition from paper to digital is always easy. There are many considerations—some of them not so obvious—that need to be taken into account when moving the plan review process from paper to digital using Bluebeam.

Whether approving plans for a single-family home or a robust, skyline-defining high-rise skyscraper, there are several process-oriented tips cities should follow to ensure a smooth transition to digital.

Here are four things cities and municipalities would be wise to consider as they undergo their paper-to-digital plan check transformations.

Appoint a leader

No matter the size of your city or municipality plan check review team, it’s critical when preparing to undergo a paper-to-digital transformation with Bluebeam that there is someone on the team leading the effort internally. This person, typically someone who has at least modest experience using Bluebeam, will act as the liaison between the city or municipality and the Bluebeam implementation team.

Channeling communication through an internal point person will alleviate potential blockers in the process of getting the rest of the team up to speed on using Bluebeam. It will also help other team members have an internal “expert” to go to when minor questions arise.

Consider process, not just software

Bluebeam Revu is an extremely malleable software that users can customize to suit their specific needs. So when preparing to use Bluebeam to transition a city’s plan check review process to digital, it’s important to consider the workflow first and then how Revu fits in it.

Luckily, Bluebeam’s professional services team can help customize Revu for each city’s particular workflow. Preparing documents ahead of the official review cycle in Revu—through software features like page labels, OCR and batch link, as well as setting up a Studio Session—can make the broader transition much easier to digest.

Simplify transition

Change is hard. From comfort level with technology to experience with digital tools, every team member is going to approach digitization differently. That’s why cities and municipalities that are going digital with their plan review process should work to simplify the process using Revu as much as possible. Start small by focusing on the easy wins that benefit the entire team. Once their knowledge of Revu expands, add more in-depth elements.

Begin with features like Profiles and Tool Sets in Revu to customize and standardize the review workflow process, making it as easy as possible for those involved.

With Profiles, cities and municipalities can eliminate toolbars and panel icons in Revu that won’t be needed. This keeps Revu’s interface simple and clean, and easier to use for team members and collaborators.

Tool Sets give the ability to create custom tools in Revu for each department that is reviewing documents, even using different colors to distinguish each department’s tools. Additionally, you can create tools in Revu that contain commonly used comments; this way each user doesn’t need to manually type them in every time.

Think beyond initial training

When it comes to learning Bluebeam Revu, process is just as important as training—and this applies to cities and municipalities embracing Revu for plan check as well.

Indeed, eventually team members will receive the training they need to use the software, but an equally important consideration when initially implementing it is the high-level process, or workflow, that the team needs the software to exist under.

How does the ideal plan check review process work? What stakeholders are involved? What sorts of reviews or markups are they conducting? What approval stamps need to be digitized? The Bluebeam professional services team can help you work out these questions and develop a process that meets your team’s specific needs.

Looking forward

No matter where cities are in their digital review journey, there are always industry consultants at Bluebeam available to help ease the transition. Revu is a powerful, comprehensive tool for the full spectrum of users across the architecture, engineering and construction industry. But that doesn’t mean that implementing Revu for the highly specific needs of a municipal plan check process needs to use the full scope of the software’s capabilities.

Simplifying Revu’s tools and streamlining how it’s used in a workflow will ensure that the transition from paper to digital is as beneficial—and easy—as possible.

This story was originally published BY CHRIS GRAHAM on the Bluebeam Blog.

Bluebeam Revu has a variety of built-in features, including a comprehensive markup tool palette. You can draw elliptical curves, lines, polylines, rectangles, text boxes, arrows, highlights, hatches, polygons and combinations thereof. You can even store custom grouped objects into the custom Tool Chest tab for later use.

For many, you have your default markups just the way you like them, and even have populated your Tool Chest tab. You feel that you’re proficient with Bluebeam Revu’s markup tools, but some things inevitably feel more cumbersome than good old pen and paper.

Have you ever drawn an object for the umpteenth time and just wished that you could somehow have multiple default settings for a markup that you could easily switch between?

For example, I often draw a callout (default hot key: “q”) that has red-colored 12-point font with no line around the text box. I also often draw blue callouts with 20-point font and a 1.0 point line weight around the text box. I have the red callout variant as my default, but I use the blue variant so often that it could just as well be my default.

For a long time, I reformatted each (default) red callout into a blue callout or copied a blue callout where needed. Thus, for each callout, I had to adjust the line color, text color, line thickness and font size. For those keeping score at home, that means I had to press the hot key, click and drag and then use seven clicks and some typing to reformat the callout.

This is about nine times slower than just using the default formatting. If I had a genie that gave me three wishes, and I wasn’t allowed to use any for client management, I think I’d use all three wishes to create my own custom Bluebeam Revu hot keys.

As it turns out, Bluebeam Revu has granted you many more than three wishes for precisely that!

Users of the Tool Chest tab will notice that there is a default partition called “My Tools.”

When you open the Tool Chest Panel (default hotkey: “Alt + X”), you will see My Tools at the top. The My Tools Tool Set is a configurable collection of frequently used tools that you can easily access. It has a few special properties you should be aware of:

• Tools in the My Tools Tool Set are automatically assigned hot keys for quick access
• The hot keys are numeric, according to the tool’s positioning in the My Tools tool set (its hot key is shown in the upper right corner of its icon)
• You can click and drag to change a tool’s position, which will automatically change its associated hot key

Now, let’s relate back to my callout formatting quandary above. I can keep my “q” hot key as the red variant by default—so far, so good. Then, I can format a blue variant callout to my liking, right click on it, mouse over “Add to Tool Chest,” and then select “My Tools.”

This places my customized markup at the end of the list in My Tools. Click and drag to place this newly added markup in the first position and the hot key labels will update automatically. You may now press “1” to select and be able to place an identical copy of this markup.