This professional guide offers a comprehensive look at how to maximize the use of toolbars on the Bluebeam platform to enhance efficiency, particularly for estimators. It provides walkthroughs on pinning items to a toolbar for faster access, customizing toolbars, and creating your own profiles depending on your focus for the day.
Key Insights
- The article details the use of 'pinning' in Bluebeam - a feature that allows users to attach specific tools to a toolbar for easy access, creating a more streamlined workflow and eliminating the need to navigate through drop-down menus every time a tool is needed.
- The guide also discusses the flexibility of Bluebeam's toolbar configuration, with options to turn certain toolbars on or off, customize toolbars to include specific tools or actions, and rearrange toolbars to various locations on the screen depending on user preference.
- Bluebeam's profile feature is highlighted, which allows users to save custom configurations of toolbars under different profiles. This is particularly useful when shifting focus between different tasks, as users can easily switch to the profile that has the necessary tools readily available, saving them the time and effort of reconfiguring toolbars each time.
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Now that we have talked about all of the different drop-down menus in the top left corner, as well as a lot of the different tools that exist within Bluebeam, now we can talk about the best ways to organize those tools to make us the most efficient estimators that we can be while working within Bluebeam. So you may have noticed on the screen all of these different icons representing tools. So I have a toolbar up at the top here and I have a toolbar over on the right.
And if we go into some of these drop-down menus and we look at items, we can see that they have this little pin next to them. So this pin allows us to determine, do we want this particular item pinned to a toolbar for faster access? And something being pinned to a toolbar just means that I can go up and select it from there and use that particular item instead of maybe having to go into the drop-down menu and find the tool from there. So the toolbar is really just putting the right tools in front of us in a very quick and streamlined manner to allow us to grab them and start to use them.
Obviously you can still use the keyboard shortcuts as well if you like that. The toolbar is simply another option to make it more efficient to be able to produce your takeoff and your estimate out of Bluebeam. So with the toolbars, as I said, you can choose what you want pinned or not pinned and you can do that over here right next to each individual tool.
But also in our tools drop-down there's going to be a toolbars option. And what we can actually do is we can go in here and we can turn certain ones on or off. So there's already going to be pre-built kind of toolbar segments.
If some of these are or are not important to us, you know, if we don't really use the text markup tools very much, let's take that off of our toolbar. So I'm going to unselect this one and we can see that this right-hand toolbar totally went away. I'll put it back there for you to look again.
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But I click that text markup bar and this bar over here appeared with all of these tools. Now these are all preset just based on collections of tools, but there is an ability to customize these if you'd like. So you could always go into this customize and you can choose for each of those toolbars which specific tools or actions exist within them.
So there's a lot of flexibility for you to go in and do this on your own, but there are some pretty good pre-built ones too. The other thing to note is that you can really move these around to different locations. We're going to go up in the top and grab the divider between these two sections of toolbar and we're just going to slide this over to maybe the right-hand side.
So it's pretty easy to grab sections of toolbar and move them around to different areas. So you can have one on the top or the right like we have here. You could even have one down at the bottom of the screen if you wanted to put these tools down at the bottom.
So you can see I can bring those tools down to the bottom and start a toolbar there. And I could do it over on the left hand side as well. Really just to illustrate here that whatever you think is the most valuable for you to have at your fingertips in the toolbar, Bluebeam does allow for that.
And once we start to get a little bit more into the measurement tools, you can see that I have some of them pinned up here. That is definitely what we're going to focus on with our toolbars is really just keeping all those measurement tools in a very easy spot for us to grab them. So one last thing that I'll mention when it comes to toolbars is within the review drop-down there is a concept of profiles within Bluebeam.
And a profile is basically a preset configuration of the different toolbars that you can have. So right now I'm on this estimate one profile that I've created. If I want to change to a different one, for example, let's say I click on field issues.
When I click on field issues, I can see that the toolbar that I had across the top is all gone now. I can see that some tools have been populated over in this right-hand panel, and I can see that the tool chest, which is something that we will get into further, has populated on my left-hand side here. What you can do with profiles in Bluebeam is, depending on what you want to focus on in Bluebeam that day, maybe you want to focus on estimating, or maybe you're going to review some submittals, or do some more design-related work, whichever tools you use the most to do those functions, you can create a profile in Bluebeam so that you don't have to reconfigure your toolbars every time you want to go ahead and do different things and use different tools.
And so you've heard me mention my estimator one profile that I've made, so let's go through a quick little tutorial on how you can make your own profile based on how you want all of your toolbars to be organized. So how we're going to do that is we're going to go up into the file or the review drop down in the top left corner, we're going to go into profiles, and let's go to manage profiles. When we're in manage profiles, this is how we can see all of the existing profiles that we already have, and this is where we can create an additional one.
So let's go and hit add, and then let's name this one whatever you want to call it. I'm going to call it estimator three because I've already made a few. You can call it your name, you can call it whatever you want to call it.
We'll hit okay, and now we are on our estimator three or our new profile that we've just made. So what we can do now is we can go ahead and make any sort of changes that we want to these toolbars to really configure this to show exactly the way we want it to show. So let's say that I want to move all of my markup tools down to the right hand side here.
So I would just drag that toolbar over to the right hand side. My measurement tools, apologies. And let's take some of these markups and throw them up at the top bar here.
I don't really need those over on the right hand side. And the way that I'm moving these around is I'm just grabbing, you can see that in front of some of these collections of icons, there is this kind of little almost ellipse looking divider. That's what I'm clicking on to pull the toolbars to different areas.
So over on the right hand side I'm going to slide this up a bit. And what else? I think I'm going to leave this as is. I really just like to have some of my measurements over on the right hand side.
Now that we've made some changes to this profile, we go back into the review drop down, we go back to profiles, and we simply would hit save profile. So that any of the changes that we've just made on the screen will automatically be saved to my estimator 3 profile that I'm currently on. So let's go ahead and hit that.
We've saved our estimator 3 profile. You can see we have all my measurement items over to the right here. Now let's just test that out.
So let's switch to a different profile. We'll switch back to field issues, which is an out-of-the-box pre-made one. Okay, so when we switch to field issues, you can see that the toolbar opens up.
You can see that in addition to some of the markups and measurements that I had, a lot of other items are showing up on the right hand side. So that's what is preset in that field issues one. If we go back and go back to the estimator 3 profile, or the one that you've just created, and you click on it, it will revert back to the default settings that we've just built out in that profile.
So it shows you all of the measurement tools that I had on the right hand side here, or whatever else you populated on your screen. So that is just a quick overview of how to create your own custom profile.
