Creating a Concise and Organized CSV Estimate Summary from Bluebeam Takeoff Data

All right, welcome back everyone. Now that we have completed our PDF output summary, we're going to go ahead and move into our CSV summary of our estimate. And that is really where we're going to come up with the main finished product of what we are going to present to our client and to our other internal stakeholders as a result of doing this takeoff in Bluebeam.

So let's go ahead and X out of our PDF summary and we'll go back into our dataset. We can save this if we want to or not save it. I'll just hit don't save for now.

When we are back into our dataset, what we're going to do is we're going to go back down to our markups bar at the bottom. We are going to filter this list once again. We will filter, we will hit subject, and then we will filter away anything that has a blank subject.

Actually, you know what, let's go to author instead. We'll filter by your name. So that way we're only looking at our specific items here.

And let's go back to summary. And when we click on the export summary button, instead of clicking on the PDF summary tab, we're going to go into the CSV summary. Again, we are going to control our settings here of what desired output we want.

And to do that, we're going to first go into columns here. Now let's just walk through all of these different columns and options. The columns that we're looking at on the screen are reflecting all of the different columns that are in our markups bar currently.

So any custom columns that we've created, like specification section. So what we're going to do is we are really going to pare down the export columns to get us a very concise CSV summary that we can use to make it a really short and to the point estimate summary. So let's go down the list here.

We're going to keep subjects, we're going to keep specification section. Let's actually drag specification section up top so that maybe we report on totals per specification section as well as individual markups within those spec sections. We'll keep spec section checked.

We'll keep subject checked. No need to have the author column. We can take away page label and comments and date.

And we can even take away some of these individual measurement types. And we can really just focus on this measurement column. The measurement column, as you can see in the background of the screen here, that's going to be the total.

So instead of maybe a wall area item being encompassed of a length and a volume, the measurement is just going to give us the total in wall area. And that's going to be the output that we're looking for. So instead of having the different pieces and parts that may make up a complex measurement like a wall area, the measurement will just give us the total.

So let's go ahead and take away length and area and wall area, volume, and count. And we will leave measurement there. We're also going to uncheck label and depth and status as well as color, layer, and space.

We will leave unit on there just as a double check from our measurement totals. And looking down through the rest of these items, I'm not seeing anything else that we should keep in here. So next up, we're going to go to filter and sort.

When we go to filter and sort, we are going to again filter out any items that have a blank specification section. So as you can see on my screen in the background here, we did make some initial markups. Things like highlights and callouts and text boxes.

We don't need to report on those since they're not actual takeoff items that are tied to a specification section. We can uncheck this blank box and it will not report on these items. Subject, again let's just go ahead and uncheck the blank one to make sure that everything that we are reporting on is a certain takeoff that we've performed.

And down at the bottom here, sort by, we can choose what we want to sort by. So like which item do we want to be kind of in the top of the hierarchy of the reporting that we are creating here. We can go by specification section as what are one of our outputs that we're going to want to show is totals per specification section and total cost per specification section.

We'll leave it at specification section and then let's just put you know maybe subject next. And that can be kind of the hierarchy of how we're going to produce this report. As you can see when I selected subject then another box comes up that says then by.

So you can really be very specific and intentional about the hierarchy in which you want to see your reporting as it's getting exported here. Next up we're going to jump over to the output section. And in output we have the ability to do things like change the file path of where it's going to go, change the file name, and down in this include section here this is where we can determine what information we're going to report on.

Is it going to be all of the individual markup line items? So on my screen all of these different standard pattern would trim items. Is it going to be the totals? Which would just be a total by specification section. So that would just give us one number and it would add up all of these individual hardwood based takeoff items.

What we want to report on is going to be both markups and totals. If we had a more simple estimate where every concrete line item or every wood framing line item had the same exact cost per unit it would be easy for us to just export totals, apply one cost figure to those totals, and then we'd have our estimate kind of created that way. Since we do have some more price figures for some of the larger specification sections like wood framing and we will get to the price sheet in a minute that is a resource that you will have and will be able to use in this lesson along with me.

But yeah the markups and totals is what we're going to export here. Once we feel good about all the things that we've selected we would simply go and hit OK. As soon as you hit OK what is going to happen is Microsoft Excel is going to open up for you and our export is going to open up in Excel.

I personally use Google Sheets so I don't really use Excel as much. So for those of you that are using Excel we can do the same functionality that we're going to walk through in Google Sheets but if you're using Excel the item is going to open up right for you in a sheet. If you're using Google Drive a really easy way to get the export in.

So let me go ahead and pull up a Google Sheet real quick and we can walk through that process. So all you have to do is go into Google Sheets. When you're in Google Sheets you would just open up a blank spreadsheet here and let's just call this estimate CSV summary.

CSV summary estimate. Okay great. When we have our sheet open here we would just go to file and we would go to import.

When we import you would go to the upload drop down in the middle of the screen. We would click on browse and when we click on browse we can just choose the most recent export. I have many different names of exports because I tested out many different ways to see what made the most sense for us.

You are probably just going to have one of these CSV files that is going to show up in your downloads. So choose that most recent item and let's import that into our sheet. And when you import there's just going to be an option to create a new spreadsheet or insert new sheets.

I'm just going to say create a new spreadsheet. All right so we have created a new sheet here and look at how our CSV export looks. I'm going to expand these columns so we can see them a little bit better here.

So this is what we were looking for right. We have we'll take structural concrete as our example. What this report does for us because we reported on both totals and markups we can see that it gives us a rolled up total of every single markup related to structural concrete.

So in cell A2 we see we have structural concrete. We see we have five items that roll up to it. Over in column C we can see that it gives us the total cubic yardage of all of our concrete items and all of the individual concrete items that make up that total are right below it.

This is going to be really helpful for us to still be able to show a high level of detail so it allows people to logically follow along. Okay how did we get to this total number? We got to it by doing the continuous footing and all of the pad footings. This is the kind of export that we are looking for and how I usually like to format an estimate is I'll usually do two different sheets and so two different tabs within this spreadsheet.

The first tab is going to be a cover sheet and that is just going to show the kind of high level totals of each specification section. So that would be what we see in row two. All of those items are we're going to pull them over to a cover sheet and then the second sheet is going to be the detail page and in the detail page it's going to encompass all of the individual markups that make up the total within a given specification section.

That's kind of the hierarchy of how I want to break this down and we're going to go ahead and reorganize this sheet to get to that format now and then once we do that we're going to pull in our cost sheet and then we're going to apply cost to these items and we're going to come up with our final cost for this estimate.