What do you wish Revu had taught you when you first started using it?

Hey folks,

I’m a Product Designer at Bluebeam, and I’m currently working on improving the Revu onboarding experience for new (and new-ish) Revu users.

I'm really hoping to get some feedback from the community about your experience learning how to use Revu.

Specifically, I'd really like to dive into the following questions:

When you first started using Revu, what was the most confusing or frustrating part of getting oriented?
What do you wish Revu had shown or taught you in your first couple of sessions?
If you were designing a “Getting Started” guide for a new coworker, what 2–3 things would you make sure they learn first?
Are there important tools or workflows you only discovered much later that you wish you had known about from day one (for example, Tool Chest, Markups List, measurements, or Studio)?
How do you personally prefer to learn new tools inside an app (short tours, embedded tips, example documents, videos, something else)?
Is there any other app that has an onboarding experience you love? Let me know!

Any stories or specific examples (what you were trying to do, what you clicked on, where you got stuck) are especially helpful. You’re also welcome to reply here or message me directly if you’d rather share privately.

Thanks so much for helping us make Revu easier to learn!
Meike

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Comments

Doug McLean

Honestly, get rid of the Revu profile.
One of the first things I do with every new user is switch them to Revu Advanced.

That one step changes the initial experience

mrossman

Hey Doug!

Thank you so much for this response! This is really helpful context for me, and I definitely agree that the profiles have a huge impact on initial experience.

I do have a quick followup, if you're open to it.

After you've switched the new user to Revu Advanced, what are the next 1-3 things you help them accomplish?

I really appreciate you taking the time to help me improve the first run experience!

David Cutler

@mrossman one feature that I didn't know about at first was the ability to change the measurement units. The base tools are assigned base units - FT, Square FT, Cubic Feet, etc. Once I found out I could set the measurements in Square Yards and Cubic Yards that saved a manual conversion step, which was very helpful.

Hope this helps. 😎

mrossman

Hey @David Cutler!

This helps a lot, thank you! And I'm so glad you were able to find this way to save time!

I'd love to learn a bit more if you're up for it.

Do you happen to remember how you learned you could change the measurements? Was it something you clicked on? Or maybe a video? Something else?

I really appreciate your feedback to help me improve Revu's product discovery!

jholman

Good Evening, I just recently started using Blue Beam. The primary use for my organization is Isometric piping drawings and markups. One thing I could suggest is a Blue Beam version that is tailored to piping systems. And adding a baseline amount of isometric piping tools to an individual tool box that already has an assortment of fittings and valves ready to go. That would be an incredible leap ahead for people in my position.

Steven Tenzel

Good evening. I have a few notes I've been hoping to have improved.

The Batch sign and seal process is too many clicks. I don't like really anything about the alternative, but some coworkers much prefer Ascertia Sign and Seal. This allows being within a folder, select a bunch of files, right click and open a dialog box. Then a handful of preselected locations, formats, then click sign & it runs all of the processes in the background.

The Shift + G, switch to multiply or Transparency. I was taught by a coworker and it's a great one!

I've also had a weird error lately. When applying Digital Signature, Date and Seal there seems to be some format of PDF creation that it places the signature up and to the right, off of the page! (and PDF looks the same from the start. We cannot tell until after the signing goes through it's process and the Signature isn't where we just placed it, then Zoom out and it's out of the Page layout.

Thank you for your time and assistance. I hope this is helpful!

David Cutler

@mrossman I don't remember for sure where I learned this, but if I had to guess I'd say I picked it up from one of @Troy DeGroot's videos or training webinars that I've attended. Perhaps from a post on the UChapter2.com website?

Another great source of learning for me has been ATG's Morning Coffee Review. The information provided by the MCR team (and regular attendees) has helped me take my Bluebeam skills to the next level.

Hope this helps. 😎

Don Walke

One thing that I've done to make it easier to develop custom formula columns is to bring all of the markup information from the measurements panel to the properties panel with custom columns. It would be helpful for a beginner to bring the Measurements Panel info into the Properties Panel.

Jared Ervin

I've made training videos for 3 of the companies I've worked for. Most common gripe I get from new users is " No one taught me how to use it." Every video session I made I would direct them back to your help menu cause y'all do such a great job.

Catered "hype" videos for different industries and disciplines. I know this can be difficult to account for all your types of users, but it would go a long way towards demonstrating the functionality of Bluebeam for specific use cases.
Under the tool chest have a quick link to the toolboxes provided by bluebeam (Revu Custom Libraries | Bluebeam Technical Support)
Some focus on the various ways to compare documents
Some more focus on markup filtering

mrossman

Thanks so much for sharing this, it’s really interesting to get insight into something so specialized like isometric piping. A prebuilt profile/tool set is exactly the kind of thing that could make Revu feel ready for your job on day one instead of something you have to configure yourself.

A quick question, have you had the chance to look at some of the custom toolsets we provide here: https://support.bluebeam.com/revu/resources/revu-custom-libraries.html#Tool ? There are some pre‑made discipline‑specific tool sets there and I’m curious whether anything in that library comes close to what you’d want for isometric piping?

Thank you again for your feedback!

mrossman

Thanks so much for sharing this—that’s really helpful input, especially the comparison to Ascertia and how your team is actually running batch sign and seal today.

Also, the Shift+G tip is a great example of the kind of “hidden gem” we’d love more users to discover without needing a coworker!

The signature‑placement issue you described sounds genuinely frustrating, I’ve alerted our Revu focused designer, so hopefully we’ll get some eyes on that asap!

mrossman

Thanks so much for sharing this. I really appreciate your insight and bringing key values from the Measurements panel into the Properties panel with custom columns is a great way to make formulas easier to build and understand.

A couple of quick questions - if you were going to explain this to a brand‑new Revu user, what would be the one or two steps you’d show them first? Are there any specific measurements you consider absolutely essential to bring into the Properties panel?

mrossman

This is great feedback, thank you so much for sharing it! I’m glad to hear our Help content is a useful way to wrap up your trainings. I also like your idea of hype videos, that would be a great way to speak to different disciplines.

If you’re open to sharing a bit more, I’d love to learn a bit about your training videos:

When you make those training videos for a new company, what are the 3–5 things you always show first, no matter the discipline?

Really appreciate the time and thought you put into this! This kind of real‑world training perspective is incredibly valuable for us.

Doug McLean

As soon as you change to this profile, you bring measurements into play.
The interface changes from something that an administrator would use to something that an Estimator would use. (ok, so I'm a bit biased).
It also splits your panels to both sides of the screen which lets users know that you can move stuff around.
This simple change transforms the experience

MWiencken

How to clean up new PDFs. Doug McLean has a great process he shared that I've found very helpful. The Bluebeam sanctioned demos I've seen are great but don't reflect the condition of the documents we usually receive. Often with drafting artifacts, multiple unwanted layers, files unnecessarily big, broken links etc. I see this as the foundation of what follows and there's nothing better than transforming a bloated mess into something organized and functional.

mrossman

Awesome, @Doug McLean thank you for those great points! I definitely want folks to understand how we support measurements and encourage them to explore the functionality as part of their first workflows. Thanks again!

Don Walke

Good questions. What I have brought into the properties panel are Length and Area by creating custom columns "MU Length" (Mark Up Length) and "MU Area" (Mark Up Area) with the formula simply being "length" and "area". These are first in the list on the Properties Panel and just below "Height 1", Height 2", "Width 1", "Width 2", and "Slope". These seven properties of any measurement markup, two actually measured and five assigned to a particular tool will generate all of the quantities I require.

Using other custom columns and a custom tool I can simply drag an area of a rectangular room and measure ceiling area, floor area, wall area, baseboard length and crown length. One length measurement of a door width with the proper tool will deduct the wall area, add in one face of the door for painting, calculate the total length of door casing and deduct the baseboard not required at the door opening. A similar window tool can add and deduct similar quantities, but would not deduct the baseboard and would add the length of window sill painting.

Similarly, I use my own slope column where I have a drop down on pitch selections with the associated roof factors as assigned values. Others may want % slope or angle based on their work flow.

Bottom line, it just makes more sense to see all of the information in one place.

mrossman

Hey there! Thanks so much for sharing this. You're absolutely right, our demos are much cleaner than many real-world PDFs folks get to work with 😅 I especially like how you framed it as "transforming a bloated mess into something organized." That is so core to the foundation of effective workflows.

I'm going to try and track down Doug's process that you mentioned, I'm always interested in hearing about resources that are helpful to our users and it seems like this is a great one! Cheers!

mrossman

Hey Don,

Thank you so much for taking the time to write out the example of your workflow. That really helps paint a picture for me!

I really appreciate this feedback!

mrossman

Hey David,

Thanks so much letting me know of some of the resources you use! There's so much good information out there, ao it's super helpful to hear firsthand what people's personal favorites are.

I appreciate your help!

dluskey

Hey, I've just started on boarding our company onto blue beam. Most of our estimators were marking up plans on paper still. Getting them to change is not easy. But the biggest selling point for them is that Revu puts items in a legend and does all the math that they would do by hand or in Excel. My issue is I still have yet to find a really in-depth video on legends. I've seen the basic video but there is so much more to legends that is not taught. And I am running into issues with having to re-populate the legends every time I start a new take-off. It never remembers what tool sets we want in our legend. (I set up the legend the way we wanted it then put in a toolset) I'm new to Revu so maybe it could do what I want, but I can't find a good training video.

At the beginning of the first video can you give us a way to download a zip with all the pdfs needed for the training. It was annoying that every new section of the training I had to stop and download a new file.

Also on custom tool sets, I watched the videos then created a bunch of tools. And they worked, but then I saw a video later about how to create tools using a snapshot where I could just hit spacebar to rotate the tool image as I placed them that was a game changer but was disappointing because now I had to recreate all my tool sets, thankfully it eliminated the need to create as many options of each tool. I wish that was mentioned in the basic training video. But I understand it's a new feature and we love it!

My last item is custom columns, please, please, please, add an if/then/else function option. I could create so many more helpful tools more easily with that ability.

Thank you for your time,

Dan

mrossman

Hey Dan,

Thank you so much for this feedback! It's really helpful to hear how you're moving estimators from paper to Revu and how Revu can really positively impact their workflows with things like automatic calculations.

Your notes about how legends need deeper training videos, training files need more straightforward access (I griped about this too!), and supporting an if/then/else option in custom columns are all really clear. Thank you so much for taking the time to share these notes with me!

Doug McLean

Hi Dan

The lack of an IF statement in the Markups list took me down an Excel journey 4.5 years ago and I'll never look back. Power Query is a really good thing.

In a few weeks, some of the Champions will be doing a Show and Tell, 3 part webinar series on tool creation that I would encourage you to be a part of.
Here's the link to the first one.
https://community.bluebeam.com/events/100-bluebeam-champion-custom-tools-show-tell-series-session-1-beginner-intermediate

Hope to see you there.

David Cutler

@dluskey creating a few tools and using a legend is a great way to start bringing your team into Revu. Working with the markups list - especially exporting the data from markups list into Excel is the next step. @Doug McLean's workflow using Power Query in Excel takes the process to a whole new level! I highly recommend attending the sessions that Doug mentioned above. They will open your eyes to a potential future state that will blow your mind! 😎

Jared Ervin

I've got some youtube videos from an older version of Revu. I've also attached a pdf that lays out the topics and some others that I didn't get to yet.

00 Getting Started (15:53min)
01 What's in a Panel (14:39min)
02 Settings at a Glance (9:55min)
03 Markup Properties (2:50min)
04 Alignment Tools (5:12min)
05 Studio Session (22:06min)
06 Comment Import & Export (4:45min)
07 Comparison & Overlay (10:41min)
08 Export Extract Pages (8:10min)
09 Image Search & Advance Material Take off (48:48min)
10 Stamping Sealing and Stamp Creation (30:49min)

https://youtu.be/a_69XnZCZMw

https://youtu.be/0CrI07-mUus

https://youtu.be/uMhHHpUMr-4

https://youtu.be/wA0KSxxI1Zs

https://youtu.be/ig9tm_qyaso

https://youtu.be/_pz9MB-KwD4

https://youtu.be/yHWDVTTVS_Y

https://youtu.be/w_Mz6QXQFiM

https://youtu.be/EkwugSdiYrU

https://youtu.be/cm_AyWrcw3A

https://youtu.be/o6zk8XChFgA

Blubeam Revu.pdf

mrossman

Hey Jared!

Woah, those resources are awesome! Thank you for making those for folks, I'm sure it was a lot of work, but so helpful!