🗓️ January 2025 Challenge - New Year, New Discoveries!

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the first Monthly Challenge of 2025! This month, we’re highlighting overlooked tools in Bluebeam Revu—those hidden gems that can make a big difference in your workflows.

What Bluebeam tools have you started using recently, or which ones do you think others should know about? Let’s kick off the year by sharing tips and learning something new!

🎖️ Recognition

Participants that post their comments here will earn a special “New Year, New Discoveries” badge and points to level up in the community!

💬 Share & Discuss

Share a Bluebeam tool you think is underrated but incredibly helpful. How do you use it, and why do you think more people should?

Engage with others by commenting on their tool suggestions, asking questions, and liking helpful discoveries.

Comments

  • Rebecca Yu
    Rebecca Yu Posts: 20

    I like to show people the "Reopen Files from Last Session" option. It's buried under File Access so unless someone points it out to you, you would probably never find it, but it's great to show those users who want to camp in files over night so they don't have to reopen everything again the next day. They love being able to just jump back in to where they left off instead.

    I do wish this was a setting though. Like you could just be asked when closing the program, "do you want to be able to go back to these files next time" or a question on start up, "do you want to reopen files from your previous work session?"

  • vfrench
    vfrench Posts: 42

    There are so many to choose from - I use sketch to scale a lot, cut-outs, flip, multiply, etc.. And as mentioned previously, dimmer is a massive help on many occasions. However, I still like the lasso tool for selecting markups - when I show this many people say they either had no idea it existed or, if they did know, they didn't know what they could use it for.

  • Good stuff ☝️☝️☝️!

    A couple of BB Interface tools come to mind - View/Full-screen Crosshair (always on) is often handy to align markups and help with drawing windows to capture exactly what you need it to. Also, View/Disable Line Weights is a great way to look at detail drawings that sometimes come out of drafting and modeling softwares with fat lines that muck up the graphics.

    @Darbie Bluebeam Party… now there is a good idea.

    ~j

  • Luke Shiras
    Luke Shiras Posts: 348

    These are all great suggestions. Many I wasn't aware of (or forgot about).

    A couple of hidden gems I can think of are Dynamic Fill and Format Painter.

  • bcostlow
    bcostlow Posts: 10

    I work with folks who really don't use Bluebeam for what it's worth and often have to point out simple features like changing tools from drawing mode to property mode. I tell them to make drawing markups as simple and reusable as possible and then to make them tools, but to default to properties mode. That way, they can customize their future markups, but they can still switch to drawing mode to automatically make some markups even faster.

    Of course, that leads to conversations about the reuse markup tool and sequence/count features.

    Another group of tools I push a lot are document overlay and color processing. Done right, they greatly increase our ability to share ideas and visualize design options in our 2D environment before pushing it through Revit or AutoCAD for 3D modeling.

    BIM Designer - Columbus, OH

  • I use most of the workflows listed here so far, but my go to is definitely the Dim feature and like @bcostlow I am always tasked with assisting users that do not take full advantage of Bluebeams capabilities. For those the KISS mentality definitely is the best way to go.

    Project and systems Administrator

    Lean Six Sigma Black belt at JPL

  • Angela Aff
    Angela Aff Posts: 164

    You should totally coin the phrase, "Bluebeam party," @Darbie!

  • One of mine is Email Templates.

    You don't know how much you need this simple tool until you have to remember who all to send that document to.