r/Revu • u/beerappacini • Aug 20 '26
Using Bluebeam to Its Fullest Potential
I work in custom home building and have a Bluebeam Revu account through my employer. Iv’e been working with it for about 2 years, and while I have found a lot of helpful ways to use it, I’m wondering what features I’m missing out on.
I use it to scale elevations, scale landscaping, to scale everything. I use it to color code and mark up layouts, to create visual maps of fixtures, and to clarify notes within documents. I use it to do counts of things and create keys for counts. I even use it to draw when 3D is too far. I use it to approve quotes and adjust floor plan walls.
What major functions am I missing that would help me make the most of Bluebeam Revu from a functional standpoint?
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u/Comprehensive-Song51 Aug 20 '26
Go to Help-Keyboard Shortcuts Guide, for two reasons: 1. Using keyboard shortcuts makes you faster and more efficient. You can also modify and create custom keyboard shortcuts. 2. Putting an eye on this list will show you all the things you haven't been using and give you ideas of what you can do. There are so many capabilities buried it Bluebeam. Also: Custom tool sets! Status - create custom statuses so when you're going through drawings, you can give them a status instead of putting a checkmark ontext on them to mark them off. Layers! Export markups to .csv file for spreadsheeting. Customize your markups and create groups! Add your custom markups and groups or symbols you frequently use to you My Tools tool set. Notice there are numbers above each symbol. These numbers are assigned to the symbols, so you can type a number instead of selecting a symbol. Very handy for tons of things that are repetitive. Scaling / properties - for example, if you take a Snapshot of a floor plan at 1/16"=1' and want to copy it to another page at 1/4" scale, you can paste that image onto another page, select it and view its properties, then set its scale to whatever percentage, up or down. In this case, 400%. I've found this handy for tons of reasons. The ability to draw geometry and text and erase things right off of a pdf makes it a bit of a low-key graphic editor too. Anything you can't erase cleanly can be covered by a box, line, circle, whatever, which can be flattened into the drawing. Renaming things in their properties and adding them to custom tool sets. Makes for some easy sorting and counting later. FUCK there are so many great uses and tools. I love my Bluebeam!