I can deal with that in PQ 😉

Great post. @jtoddowen There is a lot of value here. I do the same for customers when I build custom columns and tools. I also created custom buttons so they don’t have to go into the script dialog. I appreciate the time you put into this. If you ever want to do a presentation for our bi-weekly webinars or write a guest blog post, just let me know.

In addition to automating a manual workflow, the purpose of this post is to prevent you from relying on individual BB user profile customization as much as possible.

The following is what I wrote to prepare documents for a Quality Control Bluebeam Session. The explanation below should be helpful. BB has a limited set of scripting options, but…

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There’s a small globe icon in Bluebeam Revu that most users never click. If a button is hidden, how would you know?

Not because it isn’t useful, simply because no one helped them connect it to something valuable.

With one quick customization, that globe can become your personal help button.

By setting the Brainery Community as your WebTab home…

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And then the next thing to watch for….. 🤣

There is an Overwrite Existing File checkbox on the Batch Summary dialog box.
Uncheck that if you don’t want your original file to be overwritten

Noticed something interesting and potentially troubling this morning. Make sure you check were you are saving your markup summary! Typically – say when you are printing a document to a PDF and you are about to overwrite an existing file you will get a popup message stating that the file already exists and asking if you want to overwrite…

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Interesting idea @DavidCutler and one I will try to have a look at.
At present, as windows and doors are usually openings which are ‘square’ on the page, most of the time it is quicker to drag the polygon cut-out than it is to copy a cut out and then try to get it in the correct position.
However, that is not to say that if I can get the…

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Interesting find. Thanks for sharing. I can see where this would speed up common measurements.

Found another interesting feature of this repeatable cutout tool. To date I had only used this when copying a cutout inside of the same measurement. Turns out you can use the Cntrl-Drag feature to copy the cutout from one markup to another! Unfortunately it does have some limitations – doesn’t appear that you can drag the cutout to other…

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Proud to still do that. Hopefully, I still have some nuggets you can use. I just have to get all the way through my tips & tricks presentation. 🙃

Had a plan set to use this repeatable cutout tool again today. Reminded me of this thread. Replying so that newer folks can be aware of this feature!

Ah, I see it now, under layer properties.

A bit tricky to get set up though, a lot of trial and error.

I guess we can reset the clock on when the last time it was that you taught me something eh? 😁

Yes Sir, you can set the zoom in the Layers panel so you only see markups when zoomed into a specific scale threshold. It’s nice when you have a lot of markups in a small area, you can have smaller markups so they don’t overlap.

ok Troy, now you have to explain this one.

You mentioned this in the Tips and Trick US BUG webinar

the very first thing I would check is that all of your text is actually text and not an image. This could be the cause of the intermittent hyperlinking

Best way to check for that is to select your Select Text Icon (looks like a capital I with an A beside it) and then hover over what should be text. If it changes to a large capital I then…

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If you use layers on a regular basis, that’s a true gold nugget (or Royale with Cheese if you’re French).

Nice tip, thanks for sharing!

I always thought it was odd that I wasn’t able to reorder layers in the “layers panel”. Turns out you can reorder them after all, but there is a catch – you cannot reorder layers if you have the display set to “Show Layers On Page Only”. Once I disabled the filtered view I could click and drag the layers around as I saw fit. 🙂

I agree 100% @Doug McLean

Some of my workflow was developed before I had basic understandings of Power Query so having the required columns, in the right order saved steps in my manual data washing process. Not knowing what I didn’t know about Revu and Power Query I built very basic tools. While I know more now, I still aim to keep…

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Its actually not important at all to export your custom columns in the correct order as you can set a final column order in PQ as one of your last steps.
Table.ReorderColumns is the command.
The way I would handle this is to have a Connection Only query of the final order saved as a List, and then use the Table.ReorderColumns command with that…

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I almost always build tools with intent, and I try to work out what’s going to happen before it happens, that being said… best laid plans and all that. 💥💣

When this does happen its usually much later down the road when I realize I can use an existing data point for something else. I’ve had a couple of instances where 💡and I say, “hey, I can…

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One of the advantages of using this “ignored” column is that you don’t have to clear the information out of it when creating your upload file since the software is going to ignore it anyway… 😀

This is great @David Cutler. I’ve built tools and custom columns for customers that match the estimating software for import. Sometimes the data in those columns is empty in Bluebeam, like you said. I simply hide those columns in Bluebeam to reduce clutter. They can still export, but we don’t need to see them. Unless, of course, you’re…

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The estimating software that we use, B2W (formerly known as “Bid 2 Win”), has a very specific Excel column order. When I created my custom tools I created custom columns for each of the 9 required import columns so they would all be present, in the correct order in my CSV export file, simple enough. Where it gets interesting is that one of…

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Flattening after using this tool is a great “best practice” since when you move the content it becomes an image that could be deleted accidentally. Thank you for the tip!

🙂

Yes, this is a great tool for cleaning up existing drawings. When I teach this one, I describe it as a way to move PDF content out of the way while not removing it completely.

Any time I use this, I right away teach the right-click Flatten function so we don’t leave it as a markup with our name on it. 🤣

Stumbled onto this one today. I’ve used “Erase PDF Content” a few times before. It works well, but is very permanent, so I don’t use it often. I noticed today in the same menu that there is a “Cut PDF Content” tool in the same menu at Edit->PDF Content->Cut PDF Content.

This appears to be a mash up of the “Snapshot” tool and the “Erase…

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