That’s a great practice, and having a reminder would help as the weeks quickly fly by. Especially for someone like you with so many profiles and advanced setups.

I have a monthly reminder to do a complete backup of Bluebeam – not had to use it yet but don’t want to risk somehow losing all of thse profiles.

Every few months I hear from a student who lost real time: a customized toolbar, a Tool Chest, a batch of hyperlinks they carefully built out, all gone because a profile got overwritten or a project file got rebuilt from scratch.

It’s almost never a software problem. It’s that nobody built a habit of backing up the pieces that took the longest…

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I use custom tools in order so the markup reflects the items being counted.
As for the method of counting that depends on how many items there are as well as item being counted – things like road gullies on a large housing site will be done via visual search whereas piles to a house or block of flats will be done manually.

Quick poll for the takeoff people in here.

When you’re counting repeating items on a set, things like ceiling vents, receptacles, doors, windows, manholes, whatever repeats itself page after page, what’s your go-to method?

1. Custom count symbol built into a custom Tool Chest for each item type
2. Default checkmark, square, circle, triangle,…

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I didn’t think you were; I completely understand. If you need help building custom tools, you can check out my digital courses to get you up to speed quickly. Or we can discuss me building them for you. Welcome to the Brainery, thanks for joining the community!

By no means am i complaining. I had just seen one that said D33 so that is why oi was asking

Thanks for reaching out and downloading my free content. All of the tools are included in one downloadable zip file. Some of the divisions are not as complete as others. After several years of creating 1615 tools, I had to publish them at some point, or I never would have. I hope you understand. Sorry for the confusion.

Trying to find the Div 33 dowloads, but when I do it takes me jut to the monster 57 download. Or is it buried in there

There’s a link to the submission page in the upper right hand corner of the page.

doesn’t hurt to have that visual on the sheet just in case the calibration changes somehow.

I wasn’t aware there was an application already. Thanks for letting us know. I agree you have to learn the basics before you get overwhelmed with the possibilities. I’ll have to find the link and start brainstorming a course or two.

Good question @troy-degroot !

We set the scale on each page individually and then place a measurement on the visual scale bar to confirm the setting and indicated scale are correct.

Learn the basics then experiment. You may have a specific output that you are initially trying to generate but, if you do those two things first, then you might discover that you can produce a whole load of extra data that will help you, all with very little or no extra input.

Who has already looked at the submission guidelines for Unbound 2027?

I did and something is bothering me about them.
Everything is focusing on the end result. Nothing is focusing on the beginning.

Everything they’re looking for is about data, standards, integrations… but its all about the end result.

The NUMBER ONE thing you can do to improve…

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This is one I hear from students all the time: the scale changes somewhere in the set, and nobody catches it until the numbers are already off.

You get moving fast on a big set, and one sheet quietly switches scale on you without anything on the page flagging it. Sometimes the numbers look wrong enough to catch. Sometimes they’re off by…

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One of the most common questions I get from newer Bluebeam users: why do my markup settings keep following me from one profile to the next when I don’t want them to?

Here’s what’s going on: Bluebeam’s markup defaults live at the program level, not the profile level. So when you use “Set as Default” on a font size or color, it applies…

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Here’s something I end up telling people when they ask about marking up drawings on an
iPad in the field:

Flatten the layers you don’t need before you walk out the door. The file loads faster, your
session syncs cleaner, and you’re not hunting through markup layers that have nothing to
do with what you’re looking at on-site.

Seems obvious…

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What I know of your system Doug, the integration is so fine-tuned, they couldn’t function unless they completely committed to the workflow.

Sometimes it just takes one time-saving feature to blow their mind and convert them. The trouble is figuring out which one will trigger them. When I was a BIM Manager transitioning 70 employees across 7 offices to 3D design, I would print 3D images from my models, and purposely leave them on the printer to hear people talk about them and…

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All three members of my team use the same toolchest.
They’re designed around our Estimating software so its pretty critical that everyone is using the customized tool chests.

At this point 2 of the 3 of us on our estimating team are using the custom tools that I have built. This is working well for the 2 of us that are using them. Still trying to get our head estimator to use them… 😎

Here’s a pattern I keep running into when I talk to companies about their Bluebeam setup:

Someone on the team put real time into building a custom Tool Chest. It’s solid, for them. Organized around how they work.

And then nobody else uses it.

Not because it’s bad. But because it was built around one person’s workflow, not around how the whole…

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I’ll keep you posted @troy-degroot !

I’ve attached a quick preview of what we have created in Sketchup. Goal is to take this into a 3D PDF to share with our extended team and our customer.

I don’t have any experience with SketchUp, but I would love to see what you come up with.

Has anyone generated an IFC file using Trimble Sketchup that you have been able to use to create a 3D PDF? We’ve been modeling a foundation excavation in Sketchup Free, but would need the “Pro” subscription to have the export capability.

Great to have you in the Brainery @maxskewes

If you haven’t already looked, there might be more tools in my free download that you can apply.

Bluebeam Tool Sets

Another option to learn how to build powerful tools is in my Takeoff and Estimating classes. In 201, you will learn to build the tools,…

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Welcome to the Brainery @maxskewes

I’m not familiar with the window toolset (I work on the Civil side of the business), but you might consider making a few tools of your own that give you exactly what you need for your workflow.

The process is really quite simple:

1. Place a count measurement

2. Update your Subject and Label on the Properties…

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