Discover the steps to create a comprehensive cover sheet for your project costs. This article guides you through the process of pulling in total costs from different line items on the detail sheets, and organizing them in a total cost column on your cover sheet.
Key Insights
- The article details how to pull in total costs from various line items on detail sheets to create a total cost column on a cover sheet. This involves making formulas in the total cost column and pulling in all the different cost items from the detail sheet.
- It further guides on how to organize the total cost column effectively. This involves placing all the total cost items next to their corresponding specification sections, making it easy to associate costs with their respective items.
- In addition to the creation and organization of the total cost column, the article also provides instructions on formatting the cover sheet. This includes resizing columns, justifying text, making certain text bold, and finally exporting the completed estimate to a CSV and PDF for final submission.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
All right, so now that we are back on our cover sheet, what we're going to do is we're going to formulate our cover sheet, and how we're going to do that is we are just going to pull in the total costs that are comprised from all the different line items on the detail sheets. So to do that, we're going to just make formulas in the total cost column, and we're just going to pull in all of the different cost items from the detail sheet. So first thing here, let's go into our detail sheet, and let's do a small little format.
Let's grab our total cost column, and let's pull it over next to our specification section column. That way it'll make it easy for us to bulk select these total cost items, and know which specification section that they're associated with really, really easily. So for example, let's go back to our cover sheet.
In the total cost cell, let's hit ENTER, and let's hit sum. Once we click on enter and sum, then we can go over to our detail sheet, and then we can simply bulk select all of our structural concrete items. So that's just hitting shift and selecting all of them, and then hitting enter.
And as soon as we hit ENTER, we can see that the total cost for all of our structural concrete items shows in this column. And if we do a little reverse math, we can see that this number is accurate, because we have 7.36 cubic yards of concrete total. And when we go to our detail sheet, we can see that the cost per unit was 100.
7.36 times 100 will give us that 736 figure that we just came up with from using the formula. So let's just go ahead and power through the rest of these, and we will be done with formulating this estimate. So concrete masonry units is going to be the sum of all the CMU items, which is just one.
Learn Construction Estimating
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
Next up, we've got metal railings. That is going to be two different takeoff items, so equals sum. Detail sheet, let's select the two metal railing items, and then hit ENTER.
Okay, beautiful. Wood framing, this is where we have 26, so equals the sum. Click on sum.
Back to detail sheet. Bulk select all my wood framing items here, and then hit ENTER. That's going to give us our total.
Standard pattern wood trim is going to be our next one here. Equals the sum of, go into our detail sheet, and then choose in bulk all of the standard pattern wood trim. Enter.
That is going to be populated. Next up, we're going to do the same for our fiber cement siding here. We're going to hit sum.
We're going to choose from all of our composite siding items. Enter. There we go.
Membrane roofing up next equals sum. I'm going to get in the rhythm here and just knock these out. Membrane roofing, there we go.
We've got three to choose from. Bulk select those three, and we're good. Sheet metal roofing is up next.
We're going to do equals the sum, and we've got sheet metal roofing here. All of these sheet metal roofing items, select them, hit ENTER. Next, we've got composite doors, wood door openings, and wood windows.
We'll do composite doors right now. Composite doors, we've got these three items. Next up, we've got wood doors.
Detail sheet for our wood doors, we've got these three also. We'll hit ENTER. Next up, we've got wood windows.
Enter equals the sum of. Let's go ahead and choose all of these. Enter.
Cement stucco next equals sum. I'm going to choose all of our cement stucco items. You can see that we've got a handful of them.
Gypsum board is next here. Detail sheet. Let's grab all the gypsum board items.
We've got a lot of them. First one, all the way down to the bottom. Let's see, what did I do? Did I not put the sum in? I don't know if I did there.
Let's see. Let's go back. Equals sum.
Make sure we click on sum. Go into the detail sheet, and it's going to be just a reselection of all of these, and then hit ENTER. There we go.
That's correct. Ceramic tiling. We only have one of these, but let's still do the formula anyway.
Equals sum detail sheet ceramic tiling. Enter. Next up, hardwood flooring.
Same thing. We've got one hardwood flooring right there. Sheet carpeting.
Almost in the home stretch here. Appreciate everyone sticking along. Sheet carpeting.
Let's go ahead and grab all of those. Equals sum of these three. Plumbing fixtures.
Count of three there. Detail sheet. Plumbing fixtures.
Enter. Lastly, we have electrical. We're going to do the sum of all of our electrical items.
It's just going to be these bottom few here. We're going to hit ENTER, and then we're going to create a sum of all of these here, and we're going to make sure that that matches up with what we have on the detail sheet. We've got 83,795.31. Awesome.
On our cover sheet, we've got 83,795.31. We're just going to format this one kind of similar to how we have it on the first sheet. I'm going to go ahead and throw some filters in here. I'm going to go ahead and space these out a bit more.
Let's go on the columns. Let's select all of them and right click. Let's give these a size.
Let's hit resize columns here. We'll put these all at 300. That'll be an even one, and then we're going to keep the wording left justified.
We're going to go ahead and center justify all of the numbers and the units. We're going to go ahead and populate our total cost column here, and let's just make that bold. Let's make our other total cost bold as well.
Let's go into our detail sheet and do the same. We've got total cost, total costs. Let's actually move our column B back to the end of this like we had it before we were doing that exercise.
Looks like it fell out of our table, but that's okay. Awesome. Well guys, that is going to be kind of the final organizational structure that we're really looking for when it comes to this estimate.
So what we can do now is just export this to a CSV and a PDF, and both of those can be uploaded in as your final estimates for this course, and that is going to be the end of this lesson. So thank you all for working along with us there.
