🗓️ January 2026 Challenge - Lessons Learned!

Hi everyone!

A new year is the perfect time to reflect. As we kick off January, we’re looking back on the lessons learned from real-world use of Bluebeam Revu over the past year.

This month’s challenge is all about sharing the insights, realizations, and “if I knew then what I know now” moments that shaped how you work today. Whether it was a workflow adjustment, a feature you finally understood, or a habit you changed, your experience can help others start the year a little smarter.

📝 How to Participate

Think back on your experience using Revu in 2025 and share one lesson you learned that changed how you work.

It could be:

A feature or setting you wish you’d discovered sooner
Something you’d do differently next time
A mistake that taught you a better approach
A small adjustment that made a big difference

Post your lesson and a short explanation of what you learned. Be sure to check out others’ posts too! There’s a lot we can learn from each other’s experiences.

🏅 Rewards

All participants will earn a unique challenge badge and points to level up in the community!

📚 Resources

Bluebeam University

Bluebeam YouTube

Let’s start the year by learning from where we’ve been and helping each other move forward. Share your lesson learned below!

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Comments

David Cutler

In 2025 while performing a takeoff I noticed "inconsistencies" between what I was seeing on various pages of the utility plan. Call outs that didn't point to anything, structures on one sheet that weren't on the other, etc. My first thought was this was sloppy CAD work. What I found in the end was that it sloppy Revu work.

What I found by accident was that a couple of the layers were turned off when I received the file from the client. Digging further I found that the "Default" layer display had these layers turned off.

So, my "Lesson Learned" for 2025 is to always ensure all layers are turned on when you receive a new drawing set!

Hope this helps. 😎

lsoo

I figured out an unusual way to do inverse highlights for grayscale documents; i.e. you want to highlight the majority of the page but want to selectively unhighlight certain sections of the page.

First create your highlight as a 50% opacity rectangle, then take a snapshot of the section you want to unhighlight, place it directly above the section, and with 100% opacity on the snapshot, change the appearance properties to have a hue, saturation, or color blend mode. This makes the snapshot filter out any color from the highlights while keeping any black/grayscale text and figures unhighlighted.

Vince French

I measure a lot of works on large housing schemes where there are multiple drawings for each housetype - mainly A3's but also some A2's and A1's.
Flicking between say 4no drawings just to measure the elevations is quite a pain so, I've created some master housetype templates onto which I can drop all the drawings that I need - elevations, plans, sections and details.

It takes a bit of time to set everything up but, when it comes to measuring it is so much quicker and easier.

Jason Artley

Mine comes from a support/admin side.

Search all the things! The search window for Preferences has been a welcomed addition to Revu, and I find it exceptionally handy to find exactly what I'm after without navigating through all of the menu options. I used to spend a lot of time clicking through the options to find things. This search feature helps me quicky find settings to help configure my org or user's settings easily.

dbentz

I just learned about this community after 4 years of using Bluebeam. Extremely helpful!

Jesse Rideout

Something I learned when creating dynamic tools, the order and selection of the entities of the group matters. When you're making a tool to be edited you need text entities at the front, and the markup you right-click on to "group" gets set as the comment portion for the grouped tool.

For example, we have some ink stamps that we digitized and to get them to work better I placed the stamp border at the back, then the graphics for the stamp atop that, then the text for the date on top of the graphic. Once the stamp was in the right order I selected all the entities and specifically right-clicked the border markup to group them

Now every time you double click on the text it allows you to edit it, instead of just changing the "comment" of the tool

David Cutler

Great lesson and explanation @jrideout!

Marco M

The Lessons Learned Monthly Challenge has officially come to a close!

Thank you to everyone who participated and shared the insights, experiences, and takeaways from your time using Bluebeam Revu. Your reflections helped kick off the year with a strong focus on learning and growth.

Stay tuned for our February Monthly Challenge, coming up next!