Bluebeam Power
September 14, 2017
Bluebeam Power
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Bluebeam Revu
It's being used across the entire organization (at least in my district here in Southern California). It is a great tool to view construction PDF drawings and to easily mark up drawings and other documents. It also has some very powerful tools in the Bluebeam Studio where a group of people can work in the same document simultaneously and see real time mark ups.
- Hyperlink the drawings quickly
- Name each page in a set of drawings based on the drawing name. This can VERY quickly
- Collaborate with other people working on the same project, especially when people are in different offices
- Marking up PDFs
- The takeoff function needs some work. It's main competitor (OST) is a much easier and user-friendly tool for doing large, detailed takeoff.
- A major positive aspect is being able to take your computer home without taking the entire set of paper drawings. They have made it so easy to navigate a set of drawings that I can work at home using only the digital drawings.
- Collaboration with owners and architects has been a great feature. Setting up a Bluebeam studio and having everyone get in and mark things up, then having the architect be able to go in and see what markups have been added, has made the constructability review process much much better.
- Even when not working on drawings, Bluebeam is a very good tool for working with standard PDF documents. The markup tools are very easy to use.
- The negative aspect is the takeoff function because some people would like estimators to use the Bluebeam takeoff because it would make their job easier down the road; however, the actual act of doing a full scale takeoff in Bluebeam would require much more time.
Bluebeam is a far superior product to Adobe. I don't even think they should be in the same category for anyone in the construction industry.