This article provides an in-depth walk-through on how to navigate and utilize the various tools and functionalities within the Bluebeam software for construction estimates. The reader is introduced to the platform's menus and toolbars, document functionalities, mark up tools, and viewing options which provide a comprehensive understanding of the software's capabilities and how they contribute to creating accurate and efficient construction estimates.
Key Insights
- The Bluebeam software offers a myriad of tools for creating construction estimates, categorized within various menus and toolbars, ranging from basic document functionalities like new document creation and saving, to more complex capabilities like undo, redo, cut, copy and paste.
- Bluebeam provides robust viewing functionalities that allow users to adjust how they want to see their plans, including fit to page, side-by-side viewing, and split vertical or horizontal viewing, which can be particularly useful when needing to reference different parts of a plan simultaneously.
- The software has a 'snap to content' feature that enhances measurement accuracy by snapping to existing lines on a vector PDF. This feature is a key reason why many estimators prefer Bluebeam, as it bolsters confidence in the accuracy of their takeoff calculations and contributes significantly to efficiency.
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With that, now we are going to open up the Bluebeam software and really start to get ourselves oriented to all the different tools and some of the workflows that we're going to go through today in this Take Off and Estimate course. When we first jump into Bluebeam, we would just open it up from a shortcut in our desktop, and as soon as we open it up, it's going to take us to this blank screen here. And think of Bluebeam as a software that has a lot of different tools within it, but all those tools are going to be categorized within a few different menus and toolbars.
So up at the top left, you see the various drop-downs here, and what we're going to do is just walk through these to give everybody a really good idea of what sort of functionality exists and where it exists in the system, as well as just some really common uses and how we're going to use all these tools for creating a great construction estimate today. So what we're first going to do is in the file drop-down, this is where we have lots of options to, you know, open up a new document, create a new document, do things like save, save as, so all that really basic document functionality is going to exist here. For the purposes of today's course though, let's go ahead and open up our starting plan set.
We'll click into open, and then we will open up our cfc141 document. Of course, when we hit open, it's just going to take us into our computer and allow us to grab any sort of documents from downloads or our home page. Now that we've jumped into our plan set, we can see that it pulled up on the screen there.
We'll go back through these menus, and you can see once I did open a document, a lot of these options lit up, which means that I can now use them. So obviously if things are grayed out, we can't use them at this moment, but if things are lit up, that means that we could use them. So jumping over to the edit drop-down, this is where we're going to have things like undo and redo.
This is where we're going to have capabilities to cut, copy, and paste. So as we start to put more markups on this, and we actually start to do some of our takeoff and estimate, that copy and paste might come in handy if we don't want to have to do things over and over again, and we just want to duplicate something and copy it. Jumping down, we're going to have different methods that we can have our cursor showing as.
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Right now, I'm just using the basic select cursor. What you can also do is click on this pan right here, and the pan is going to allow you to left-click on the screen and really start to drag this plan wherever you want it to be. So that one comes in handy when navigating through plan sets.
We'll usually stick with the select or the pan, depending on how we're feeling. What also comes in handy in this tab is going to be this lasso tool. Now, we don't have a ton of markups on our screen quite yet, but when we do, this lasso tool is very helpful to allow you to draw a certain area, and every markup or object contained within that area will be selected in bulk.
So that you can go ahead and do things like bulk delete or bulk change properties of a certain group of markups. So there is definitely some strong bulk edit functionalities that exist within Bluebeam. And lastly, we have our snapshot.
Snapshot is going to be really helpful to grab a screen clip of something that we're looking at on the screen, and either take it outside of Bluebeam and email it to someone, or take a detail page and paste the screen clip onto another page in our plan set to make it easy for us to kind of compare and contrast between the two. So that's our edit drop down. Over into view, Bluebeam's got a ton of functionality that allows us to kind of determine how we want to see the plans.
So up at the top here, a very common one is just fit to page. So it takes my plan and makes sure that it fits fully in my current screen of reference. Another thing that you can do is start to view two items side by side.
So this will take two continuous items in your plan set and allow you to view them next to each other. If you do happen to have maybe like a really big screen and you like to look at multiple documents at once, you can certainly do that here. We'll go back to single page.
That's typically how I like to operate. Back in that view drop down, another really helpful thing that is used for takeoffs quite often is going to be this split vertical functionality. You can do horizontal as well.
I prefer vertical. When I click on split vertical, what that does is it splits out my view into two separate windows. Now we're still looking at the same exact set of documents.
It just breaks them out into two distinct windows. And what we can do here is view two different plans at the same time. So right now let's say we're looking at this A2.1 and I'm clicking on this and I'm holding in control right now.
And I'm going to just wheel forward with the mouse and it's going to allow me to zoom in a little bit. So let's say I want to look at this floor plan on the left and I see there's a cut through here and it's detail one on A4.3. So I want to keep this floor plan up on the left, but I want to go to that detail page over on the right. So I will click into the right window over here and then I can navigate through my thumbnails over on the left hand side here to that plan A4.3. So with this split vertical functionality, you can see I have a few markups, that I'll delete to get out of our way.
With this split view functionality, we can look at the floor plan, identify a cut through that we need to see, and then go to a different page and actually pull up that cut through right here. So the split vertical and split horizontal functionality really helpful if I'm doing a takeoff of a certain area and maybe I need to reference the details of how that area is constructed to really make sure that I'm doing an accurate takeoff. We'll click out of that split view and we'll go back to our regular view and let's go back to fit to page here to zoom everything back for us.
Back into that view drop down, those are some of the key things that we'll probably use. Down here, a really helpful part of Bluebeam is the snap to content feature and that's something that we'll dig into a little more when we start to do our measurements. But that basically allows us to use some of the lines that are already existing in this pdf.
This is going to be a vector pdf so there's a lot of different layering already built into this pdf. This snap to content feature of Bluebeam will allow us to do our takeoffs and actually allow our measurements to snap to the different line objects that exist on this pdf. We're not making any sort of guesses when it comes to making sure that we get all the corners and all the different architectural designs of these plans when we're doing a takeoff of them.
We're actually snapping to the lines as they are drawn and designed and we'll have much more to come on that as we start to do our takeoffs. But I did just want to highlight that that is a very important feature of Bluebeam and it's actually why a lot of estimators prefer it because it does really help with efficiency and really making sure that you feel confident in the takeoffs that you are performing.
