[David Cutler]

Thank you for sharing this @vince !

If you are faster with a hard copy and highlighters you need to provide a video of you in production mode!

You hit the nail on the head when you said that the additional data that you collect outweighs the additional time that you spend in the process. Don’t forget that you are also saving the time that I takes to plot the drawings, file them when you’re done with your takeoff, find them again when you need to look something up, etc.

I want to go back and watch the video again before I make any suggestions, but what you’ve put together so far is brilliant!

[Vince French]

Thanks David! Maybe on the next tender I’ll do one housetype on Revu and the same again on my spreadsheet.

[David Cutler]

Okay, first idea, use standard door tools (already drawn to scale) for your interior openings. Place them on your interior wall markups, bring the wall markup to the front and then use the cutout tool to make the openings snapping to the door markup.

Disclaimer – I’m thinking out loud here and haven’t tried this so it may not work with the sized markup behind the wall markup. 😎

[David Cutler]

Second idea – setup reusable cutouts for openings. I’m pretty sure you introduced me to this method @vince

Basic idea here would be to establish a markup that has a series of standard sized cutouts already made. You should be able to apply wall of standards group of cutouts onto your takeoff sheet and then drag the appropriate sized cutout from the wall of standards onto your specific takeoff. The idea here is to eliminate the need to continuously draw new “sketch to scale” markups and then have to trace them to make cutouts.

[Vince French]

Both great ideas David.
I’ve actually already got a couple of template toolchests – one for the storey heights of buildings and the other for internal wall opening sizes as below.

The latter will need filling out at the start of each project as the ‘standard’ opening sizes change on every project e.g. a standard width for a window always used to be 1200mm but now they are drawn as 1200mm, 1210mm, 1248mm and 1250mm – it’s very frustrating from a measuring point of view but even worse for the guys on site as they are not working to full or half brick sizes a lot of the time. Populating the toolbox to cover all the different sizes used might just become a bit too messy.

The other trick that I have found is to use the polyline sketch to scale tool to make a 3-sided shape. If you use this, then you don’t have to worry about which layer is at the front when you do your cutout.

[rob gibson]

Top drawer stuff Vince,

must get to grips with power query.

When i do internal deducts on plan, i use a simple line tool named ddt,then use a custom height column as a multiplier,……. i know its more math after the export

i have also seen recently ,one of my students using the same tool description…..then simply enter a -minus figure as the multiplier so it stays in the same description and reduces the running total