[Doug McLean]

Hi Rob

Without knowing a bit more it would be hard to answer.
Did you do anything more than have it link to a specific tool?
i.e. a floor, space, etc?

[Doug McLean]

Hi Margaret

Unfortunately, you cannot copy/ paste a sequence.

[Doug McLean]

That’s the way whoever created the PDF’s chose to label them.

Quickly fixed with page labeling

[Doug McLean]

Well at least someone else has found my frustration with Quantity Link when doing something for the finishing trades.
We can’t set up and use a template, so it becomes VERY time consuming to set up.

As others have said, export the data to a csv file and then use probably Excel’s most powerful tool, Power Query to do the heavy lifting. It’ll take you a while to learn it, but once you get it, its amazing.

Both Vince and myself have some pretty cool workflows using PQ, so if you need some help, just ask.

[Doug McLean]

I once used it to unsubscribe from an email list.

For some reason our Estimating email got on this email list that was all in Russian. I couldn’t read it to figure out how to unsubscribe. I eventually had a lightbulb moment.

I made a PDF out of the email, then used a highlighter and the Translate Markups function to figure out where the Unsubscribe link was.

Worked like a charm.

[Doug McLean]

Hi Jerome,

Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t natively handle base 12, so it won’t export in ft-in.

Others have suggested various workarounds but my suggestion would be to reformat the data in Power Query before it gets imported into your takeoff software. It would be quite easy to achieve and be very repeatable.

Is your software only capable of working in ft-in, or can it work in just inches?

[Doug McLean]

The problem comes when you need to break it down beyond a simple quantity.
When you need it by floor, phase, building, room, elevation…. quantity link is simply too difficult to set up.
Building the custom columns for Finish Carpentry is time consuming, but relatively easy. Linking all of that to Excel, that’s where its a PITA.

You’re right though, you can set it up so that you’re getting lots of data from just one or two markups.

[Doug McLean]

start with this guy
Mike Girvin at Excelisfun on YouTube

[Doug McLean]

you’re just going to have to let Vince and I show you some basic stuff in PQ.
😁😁

[Doug McLean]

reusing the query is easy David.
There are a few ways to do it actually.

One I talk about in my presentation

[Doug McLean]

Power Automate will be no use, as there is no connector.
I’ve made several attempts at trying to extract the data directly from a PDF rather than exporting a Markup Summary, but I can’t find a way to do it.

For a consistent data export, your best bet is to build a reusable BatchConfig file. This way, you’ll always get the columns you need in a consistent layout. It will be named the same, everything will be consistent. The only thing you’ll have to change is the save location.

Once that’s done, Power Query is the way to go to get the outputs that you need.

[Doug McLean]

finally diving in eh David?

[Doug McLean]

There isn’t a PA connector to Revu

[Doug McLean]

by the way…. this is brilliant.
I never would have thought of doing that. EVER.

[Doug McLean]

What you COULD do, but you’d still need PQ, is export a PDF report. Then you can use Power Query to get the data from that report. I’m pretty sure that the PDF report will display in ft-in.

PQ will bring in the data as ft-in which you can then export to Excel. A quick save as a CSV file would be all that you need.