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Creating a multi-attribute callout tool for Excel export

Timothy Hird-Devlin

Hello, I'm trying to use bluebeam for my engineering takeoff but I'm not finding it nearly as useful as I thought it could be.

I'm trying to make a callout tool with a few discrete attributes (HVAC Tag, Equipment Location, Room Served, Controller) that can be typed into the callout, displayed within the callout on the drawing, and exported to excel with each attribute in its own column, or imported from excel for updates.

I've tried using grouped text boxes but that doesn't seem to support exporting, I've created custom columns but haven't found a way to link the text displayed in the callout to the column value, it seems to be possible to use «column» formatting to link a label in a measurement tool but I really don't have any use for the measurement tools in my industry (HVAC controls.)

Does anybody have any ideas? I thought this would be much simpler

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Doug McLean

What you are going to need to do is build yourself some custom columns.
Then you can try using some custom labeling functions to show what you want to show. Look up dynamic labeling in the help menu. Then you'll have to enable the Captions with the label.

You could also try building a custom stamp with some JavaScript to populate the stamp, but that's a bit extreme.

The export itself comes from your custom columns, so that's where the data needs to be.

Timothy Hird-Devlin

I've been trying custom columns but I don't see that text boxes or callout have captions that can be displayed? I've started going down the road of using grouped measurement tools but hiding the dimensional arrows and using them only to display captions, but this seems a silly circuitous route for what I thought would be built into the program?

Timothy Hird-Devlin

A follow-up to this, trying to build a tag using captions, but whenever the group is copied and pasted all the measurements are moved? This is very frustrating

Doug McLean

Is there a reason you need it to be displayed?

Doug McLean

You may want to take a look at the Custom Stamp option.

Honestly though, you can do all of your workflow except the visual display part right now. As of now, you can't import excel data into Revu. Its something that AI may be able to help with in the coming months.

This could be what you're looking for though, at least close enough. Setting a Dynamic label
In you Label field type in « and a list of items will appear. Play around with that and see if its at least close.

Something else to consider is making Spaces around each of your items. That way you can sort and export the markups list by Space, which should help with your other workflows

Timothy Hird-Devlin

Thanks for the help, I haven't gotten as far as figuring out import yet so good to know that that's not feasible yet either. Honestly I'm just going to let my trial expire in this case, I'm not finding as much value as I was hoping for, I was hoping it'd have something similar to Autocad's block attribute import/export tool, makes automating with excel a breeze.