🗓️ 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!

Monthly Challenge- New Year, New Discoveries.svg

🎖️ 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.

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I use a combo of tools I got from @JJones in the November Challenge, I review my teams color coded redlines with a combo of filtering the markup list by color and flipping the dimmer (CTLR+F5) on and off.

The dimmer has been my "Bluebeam" party trick for the past two month!

I feel like the reduce file size tool gets overlooked. Something as simple as changing scanned documents to greyscale or image DPI to 150 can dramatically reduce file size and improve how quickly files load and pages render. These large reports or plan sets that are 100's of MB or GB's in size can really slow things down when working on the cloud. It's easy to take computer memory, file storage and network speed for granted sometimes, and important to remember to keep file sizes under control when they are going to be used by a lot of people and accessed often.

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?"

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.

The Alignment panel is totally one that people don't know - especially the distributed horizontal / vertical!

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.

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.

Brandon Costlow

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.

Jorge Contreras

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.

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

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