Tool Chest Advanced Recents

Seth Gamble

I think being adding a section in the Tool Chest that shows the markups used on the current document you are on. This would serve a similar but in my opinion more beneficial purpose as the current Recent Tools section. Also, with the current recent tools secion, having the ability to use the detail view and not just the symbol view would be a nice option to have.

Katie Murff

Hi Seth.

Thanks for sharing this.

How many tools do you typically use for a takeoff? Do you tend to use one group of tools for one type of takeoff and another set for a different type of takeoff?

Seth Gamble

My team frequently uses a large amount of tools for a multitude of structural steel shapes. We have attempted to keep the shapes to a small amount but there are so many common shapes not even all of them being in our tool chest.

The new search tool has been very helpful in quickly finding the right tool. However, this feature I am requesting would be even more convenient. It would be great to have a section, similar to the "Recent Tools" tab, that keeps a list of markups on the set of drawings. This way, if we reuse one steel shape multiple times throughout the drawings, it will be more readily available.

I came to this idea after I tried achieving the same goal with the current "Recent Tools" grouping, but it seems a little hard to use. You can only see the symbol and not the title of the tool, making it difficult to know what I am grabbing without hovering over it or clicking on it, which becomes frustrating over an entire job.

Ideally any markups on the drawings would appear (in their properties mode) automatically in this section (whether that be a standalone section or a new mode/option under the Recent Tools section). Then you could actually copy a markup into your toolchest if you want directly from this section, which would be convenient in general and be a little more intuitive than going into properties to add a markup to the toolchest. I'm just throwing a few things out there as ideas of course it could be done may ways. I also see this being useful when passing drawings to coworkers as my markups would not currently appear in their recents.

Note the screenshots below show the lack of Detail/Symbol mode on the Recent Tools which gets convoluted quickly with so many similar shapes and colors.