Every construction trade plays a different role in each construction project. As a result, they are likely to find different values in the myriad tools and features available in Bluebeam Revu.
Kaaron Lee-Wah, an electrician in Toronto, is no different. To him, Revu has become essential ever since his boss asked him to explore how to completely digitize his company’s electrical drawings from paper. Revu has allowed him to use tools in the software that make his job more efficient, helping him to save time on previous paper-based tasks.
These are the Revu features that are unquestionably Kaaron’s favorite:
Tool Chest: “This allows you to create custom icons to help identify and create a clean and easy layout for your guys in the field to follow along. When it comes to electricians using Bluebeam, there are many different panels, circuits and devices that we have to account for and include on our drawing. With Tool Chest, you can create icons, color whatever size you need it, all in a matter of seconds—and they look very professional.”
Calibrate: “The Calibrate feature is pretty dope, where you’re able to upload a PDF version of any drawing—whether it be mechanical, architecture, electrical, even landscape—and you can customize that calibration to that specific scale. So, drawings come in many different scales, and other software have a hard time picking up and reading that scale of a drawing. But Bluebeam has a great feature, the Command + M tool, that can measure it, and you’re able to customize and calibrate any drawing or PDF you upload into Bluebeam, which gives you access to finding whatever measurement that you need—whether it be in millimeters or meters or feet—all off the custom calibration once you upload it into your Bluebeam Revu.”
Overlay Pages: “It’s kind of similar to Snapshot, but with Overlay you’re able to grab the entire page itself and overlay it on top of a second set of drawings, and then that can help you identify or troubleshoot any issues with architecture and electrical drawings.”
Snapshot: “I find with Snapshot you’re able to now copy a section—let’s say the electrical drawings—and bring them over to the architectural drawings if you want to overlay for a certain reason. So, what we do in the electrical trade is I’ll take a Snapshot of the electrical drawings of let’s say a unit in a condo, and I will overlay it on the architectural drawings, which show you more detail—wall sizes, how long a wall is, how deep the wall is. It’s an amazing feature, and it comes in clutch every time.”
