Mastering Bluebeam's Core Tools for Efficient Plan Markups, Notes, and Takeoff Preparation

Jumping over into the document dropdown, we're just going to make our way through all these and then we'll dive into the takeoff itself a bit more. In this document dropdown, this is where we can start to do things like extract pages out of a set or replace pages, crop things, perform overlays if we have revisions within our plan sets. So not stuff that we'll spend a ton of time on today, but really, really helpful when you have a ton of revisions coming in and maybe you need to help try to highlight the differences between, you know, revision one and revision two to do a revised pricing estimate on those items.

Lastly here, we do have a flatten and unflatten capability. So as we start to put markups on these plans in the future, we can use this flatten functionality to make sure that they can't be accidentally moved or deleted or anything like that by somebody that may look at this PDF after us. So that kind of helps to lock in any of the changes or markups that we would have made.

Jumping over to batch, batch is going to be a lot of similar functionality to that document dropdown that we just looked at. However, batch is going to be in more of a group or bulk format where we would be doing these things to a set of plans instead of just maybe one plan. So jumping over into tools, tools is where we are going to live for the majority of this course, and the tools area is really what enables us to do a lot of the takeoff in estimating within Bluebeam.

So this is going to be the sweet spot for us today in this course, and we're going to spend a lot of time working through these different tools. So let me navigate to a plan. I'll go to this second plan here.

And by the way, I haven't quite gotten into this yet, but this left-hand side toolbar, which we'll talk about a lot more in this course, this is where our thumbnails are housed. Personally for me, I love this thumbnails bar. It really allows me to scroll up and down and kind of navigate through my plan set pretty easily.

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There's a lot of flexibility to naming and numbering of these plans as well, so it can make it easy for you to scroll through a plan set if you have a very large one. It allows you to scroll all the way down to the bottom and jump to a certain plan by just clicking on it pretty easily. So more to come on this left-hand toolbar here, but just wanted to highlight that now.

So back into the toolbar. This toolbar is going to house all the different tools that we're going to use to do our takeoff here. We'll start to look at some of the most commonly used ones.

Textbox and notes and callouts are really, really valuable for estimators to either leave notes for themselves, so when they come back to work on the plan set again, they don't let things fall through the cracks. They could also leave notes or text items for other people on their team. Maybe there's a, you know, a pre-construction manager who wants to do a high-level review of the takeoffs.

You could leave some notes for that person to see. But how do we use these? So they're very simple. I'm just going to go ahead and scroll in on the plan set here.

And I'm scrolling in by using the wheel on my mouse here. So you can see me now I'm wheeling back towards myself, so it's zooming out. And now I'm pushing the wheel forward, so I'm zooming in.

Really easy way to kind of zoom in and out just using that mouse scroll. In tools, in markup, we'll just go with the textbox here. So you grab the textbox, you click a corner to start it on, and then you just drag the other corner to be however big of a textbox you want it to be.

You can go ahead and type in that textbox whatever you want to say. And a really good thing to know about any markups or things that you do in Bluebeam, if you go over to this properties cog over on the left hand side here, you're going to have the ability to control a lot of the different appearance related items that have to do with that textbox. If I want to do something like change the perimeter color of the textbox, if I want to change the line width to make it thicker or thinner, the line style, it could be a dashed line, it could be a straight line, font size of my text in there.

I can change this up to 20 to make it a bigger font. And even the font color, if I want to turn that from red to blue, I can change it that way. Now, pause the video and take a moment to draw your own textbox on Thumbnail 2. Please feel free to change the colors or adjust the text or settings.

Let's keep moving. A lot of flexibility when it comes to changing the appearance on not just a textbox but all of the different markups and measurements that we're going to be looking at today. You can do these changes on a one-off individual basis.

So, hey, I just want this box to look this way. You can also start to set things as the default so that every next textbox I create will follow the same kind of color scheme and appearance scheme as the one that I made before. What you can also do is add these to your tool chest, and that's something we're going to get into more as we start to do more of the takeoffs.

But the tool chest is effectively creating a lot of different markup and measurement items that we're going to continue to use on a repeated basis so that we don't have to go in and keep creating a certain area takeoff tool to then go do a floor or a ceiling or an item like that. So, more to come on the tool chest, but I just wanted to highlight it while it was in front of us now. Back to our tool drop-down.

So, we talked about a textbox. Really easy to throw that in there. Typewriter is very similar, just without the actual box around it.

Notes. We'll grab a note. We'll put a note out here.

Notes are going to be a very valuable part of the estimator's toolbox here. I'm just going to hold in a letter. The reason I'm doing this is to highlight the fact that you can capture a lot of text or a pretty large message within this note.

Once you click out of the note, that side panel goes away and the note becomes this really small, really inconspicuous reminder that, hey, there is something that you need to either look out for or remember or double check related to this note. So, again, if you don't want to draw a big text box on the plans that may get in the way of what you're trying to be estimating, a note is a super helpful feature to still allow you to pack a good amount of information in there but not take up a ton of space on the plans themselves. So notes are going to be super helpful for that.

Once again, pause the video and add a note to thumbnail two. Let's keep it going. Back up to our tool drop-down, going into markups, a callout is going to be the next text-related item that we're going to talk about.

So a callout, let's say I want to bring someone's attention to this number 20 note right here. Instead of me writing over this note or writing a text box right next to it, I can actually click the callout and it'll take an arrow from that item and it'll allow me to bring my text box down and away from where that actual item is. So it allows me to grab someone's attention by saying, hey, I'm talking about this particular note, number 20, but also bring the text over to an area that may be easier to read or notice or again not get in the way of what is already drawn on the plans.

So the callout is effectively just a text box that has an arrow attached to it. So you can do the same things like maybe bump up that line width and make it a little bit thicker, do things like changing the line colors to maybe designate a certain user or a certain status for like a comment or something like that. So those are just some of the basic text markups that you can do.

And we can also jump into some of the different shapes and some of the kind of pen and highlighter ones as well. Another really important thing to note here is that while I've been going into these drop-downs and actually choosing each one of these tools here, most of them are going to have these keyboard shortcuts associated with them as well. So for example, we can look at this highlighter tool.

Instead of me having to go into this drop-down and choose the highlighter, I could also just hit the H button on my keyboard and it'll automatically queue up the highlighter for me. So let's try that. Let's go up and look at these mechanical notes and I'm just going to click H. As soon as I hit H on my keyboard, it's going to bring up that highlighter for me and it's going to allow me to highlight the text and it becomes a way faster way to kind of start using some of these tools without having to go into all the drop-downs.

If you do like to use hotkeys or shortcuts in your keyboard, you'll see that most of these tools next to them do have those and you can certainly feel free to utilize those as we go throughout this course. We looked at that highlight tool, the pen tool is very similar, and the erase tool is just to take away the pen or the highlights. Jumping down here, there are various shapes that we can create within Bluebeam and we're probably not going to spend a ton of time on these in this particular course because as we get into the actual measurement part of the course, we're still doing something similar in that we're almost drawing types of shapes, but we're going to have measurements associated with those shapes where we can actually start to quantify the quantities of the items in the particular room.

We'll do a lot of the kind of shape work when we start to look at measurements. And lastly here, just to get through our top left drop-down toolbars, the last thing to note is the full screen capabilities under this window drop-down. If you want to remove some of these kind of side borders and give yourself a bigger area to do the takeoffs from, we'll go ahead and click that full screen button and we'll see the screen start to adjust itself.

And there we go, we can see that the toolbars that were all along the top and the right hand side here have been reduced and we actually get a bigger area to just see the plans and to do some takeoffs from. And you'll also get this kind of floating action panel over here where you can have different tools for your takeoffs, your shapes, your highlighters, whatever you're going to be using most often, you can have that on this panel over here. That was our walkthrough of these core kind of categories of tools within Bluebeam and now we're going to go ahead and actually start to explore the actual measurement tools of Bluebeam a bit more.