Bluebeam - An application that has featured in many of our talks, blogs and articles in the past.
If you are looking for some completely impartial advise as a business, then this software is extremely solid. In the year that is 2020, where COVID-19 has been the catalyst for the digitalization of so many industries, what we have found in GagaMuller is that COVID-19 has also, quite surprisingly, opened up communication and helped us to gain trust in one and other.
No better time than in crisis do both friend and foe alike open lines of communication in order to seek advice and survive. So here's what we have been advising.
Bluebeam, like many other software providers, was here long before the COVID-19 outbreak, but its power is unquestionable.
For as long as we have been reviewing and using different software, very few of them have left us in awe of their capabilities - Bluebeam does just that. For most of you reading this, you will spend more money on coffee per month than a subscription to Bluebeam.
(To Bluebeam stakeholders...if your are reading this, we think you charge too little...) there we said it, we are not even sorry.
The message here is clear:
If you still use Adobe to look at your PDFs, that is literally no benefit to you. We look at you in the same way you look at someone using a CD player to listen to their music when there is a free app called Spotify on your phone.
We don't sell Bluebeam, we don't have a promo code, we don't get anything for our referrals.
We are simply trying to help our readers and the industry to adopt the technologies that are available to them. Our reasoning is simple: Toyota educated the entire industry back in the 1950s in order to bring the industry forward so they could eliminate cost and waste by upskilling their suppliers and thus their competitors.
With that in mind, below is the list of the 5 best features and reasons for you to try instant coffee at home for a month and buy yourself some Bluebeam! (All of which is only in GagaMuller's opinion).
5. Creating hyperlinks within drawings.
Either automatically or automated, you could have a full drawing pack of hundreds of drawings and specifications. Using some smart technology, you can actually load these up to be fully linked.
What does that mean, you say?
Imagine you go to a random floor plan and see a section icon and a drawing reference: wouldn't it be cool to just click on that reference label and open that section? Well, you can, and even better you can hyperlink more than just drawing references.
Educate Bluebeam to your project's file naming structure and it can even find specifications and submittals. So satisfying once it has been set up.
4. Professional and clean markup ability.
It is simply in a league of its own when it comes to its ability and options for markups and editing drawings, so much so that it is initially slightly intimidating when you open it for the first time.....stick with it, trust us.
The ability to create stamps is great for "Digital Signatures" for a company stamping documents; The use of Bluebeam Studio introduces a fully traceable cloud-based communications platform used for conversations on a drawing. Great for drawing review and approvals.
3. OCR automatic superseding of drawings.
This is a masterpiece and it only evades the second place due to its initial complexity to get set up. However, once done, you could have a system where you can store all of your project drawings, then, as soon as an updated revision is saved, it automatically stamps the drawing as superseded and saves it beneath it. So therefore, if any user (either on desktop or on mobile app) does not only always have the latest drawing, they can quickly flick back to the superseded ones. An extremely user-friendly feature.
2. Calibrate Bluebeam and it can very quickly become a weapon for your quantity takeoffs.
Scaling drawings allows for quantitation measurements and area calculations. It allows you to create your own chest of symbols and stamps that you can use to overlay and markup your drawing. This brings a level of sophistication that others could easily pass off your markups as original...
It could be handy, we will say no more and let you come to your own conclusions there...
1. At GagaMuller, we are firm believers in the simple things.
Get them right and the crowd will follow. Never portrayed as a feature, funnily enough, Bluebeam can actually convert any PDF file to Word, and even better, ANY table in a PDF file straight into Excel....QS's you heard me right, don't sit here and pretend you haven't spent hours in the past creating an excel from a PDF manually.