Bluebeam Revu 2017: drawing comparison, measurements linked to Excel and Studio

A 2017 webinar presented by Joana Alsasua on Bluebeam Revu 2017, part of a series of technical sessions for architecture and construction. Revu is introduced as an application for creating, editing and sharing PDFs with tools specific to the sector, and the presenter organises the hour into three blocks: comparison, measurement and communication. Beforehand she goes through the interface, the working profiles — among them the construction profile — and the side document panel. The first part deals with navigation and comparison. When a technical specification is opened the mouse wheel scrolls the text and, when a drawing is opened, it switches to zooming. The screen is split into tabs to view several documents at once and the views are synchronised, so that moving through one makes the other follow. On two versions of an elevation the two routes to comparison are shown: overlay, which combines the PDFs in different colours like the old light tables, and document comparison, which goes through both files pixel by pixel and records each difference as a markup. The measurement block starts with calibration: two points of known dimension are taken to set the real scale before measuring. Then come dimensions, perimeters, areas and volumes, and for rooms with an irregular outline dynamic fill is used, closing the outline and obtaining the surface area with the fill bucket. Each measurement remains as a markup in the list below, which works like a spreadsheet: one row per element and columns created by the user, among them a bill item code. That code is what links the PDF to an Excel sheet through Quantity Link, an add-in that Revu installs in Microsoft Office: from Excel the area associated with a code is requested and the sheet picks up the total; when another measurement with the same code is added, the total updates. Counting by units is also shown. In the communication section a drawing commented on by several professionals is reviewed: each annotation carries an author, a discipline, an assignee and a status, and from the list a PDF summary is generated whose entries link to the exact point on the drawing. The closing section belongs to Studio: projects hold documents of any type and require a check out before they can be edited, so that nobody else touches them in the meantime; sessions allow work on the same PDF in real time, with an internal chat and an activity record. This is a 2017 recording: what is seen on screen corresponds to that version of the software.