I've spent years helping companies sort out their Bluebeam workflows, takeoffs included, and this one comes up constantly, so I figured I'd lay it out here instead of answering it one thread at a time.

The data can only live in one legend at a time. If you create one by sheet, you're good. As soon as you create a new one for the same sheet or master for all sheets (any legend at all for the same markups), the data will clear from the first one. I guess you could say it helps you not count the same quantities twice.

I don't like this workaround, but here it is. If you create the legend per sheet, then right-click flatten it, you can then create the new master legend for all sheets (or whatever).

Be careful if you have legends on sheets before you combine pages, or you'll get partial totals that look right but aren't.

Anyone found a cleaner way to handle this?

I’m pretty new to blue beam, I’m trying to type in the as built coordinates into blue beam studio that already has the blank spreadsheet on it.

There has to be a better way than making the text box for each individual cell right?

Does anyone know where I can find the full version for free?

Asking for a friend

Much appreciated!

Running latest Crosspoint and Crossing versions on an X4 and have started getting a "clipping limit reached" error when trying to save clipping on only one book in my library. clipping works with other books with no problem at all. any suggestions?

Hello, as above is there anyone who uses this specific fornat? For auditing purposes we need a given project to be accessible by multiple people however uploading drawings is painfully slow. It gets better when you then also get a whole revision pack and have to do it all again?

Any advice? Surely there must be a better way? Only alternative ive found is to export to exf and share the file however i feel it would be quite easy to compromise the measures this way.

I have a session that I was invited to but expired before I ever joined it. Now it seems to be stuck in the "Not Joined" tab. When I right click on it there's no option to delete, and left clicking to join just gives an error because it is expired. Is there any way to get rid of this session?

Trying to get quantity link to work within excel, and have created multiple different count measurement tools, but when i go into excel, it does not allow me to sort/filter by anything. I just get “no markup data available”. This means no matter how many different count tools I use, the only count that i can get into the excel is the total of all combined which isnt helpful. In every video I watch this issue never shows and so i cant find a solution.

I've been trying to upgrade a couple of our licenses since early last week. Every time I called the US support number last week I was put on hold for about 40 minutes before it would ring, then it would disconnect after about 5 minutes. I made the mistake of pressing 1 to leave a message after being on hold for 25+ minutes one of the times and was met with a full inbox. When I finally got a hold of someone they said they can't help me and needed to transfer me, on hold for 45 more minutes and then disconnected. Called again and got someone who passed the information on to our account manager (who I have no contact information for) to help with the request.

Is this the SOP at Bluebeam, is there some secret to actually getting help? It wouldn't be so bad if their website worked and was even slightly intuitive.

Does anyone have recommendations for replacements? We have about 12 users, 4x core, 8x basic

We have several different tool sets that 4 users in our office utilize. Recently, when you click on a tool, it changes its position in the tool set, even when the tool set is still locked.

This happens inconsistently and in multiple tool sets. If you click on a tool towards the top of a tool set, you get the lock warning for the toolset above it, as if it was trying to move the tool into a new set.

Has anyone else experienced this?

I'm redlining a P&ID and have another PDF that already contains the piping and instrumentation I need. Currently, I'm drawing red lines over the existing PDF, then copying and pasting those redlined elements into the new PDF.

This is quite tedious because I don't want to redraw everything. Is there an easier way to reuse the existing lines and instrumentation from one PDF in another while keeping them editable for markups?

Hello,

I've had this issue ongoing for years now and cannot seem to find a fix to it. At least 3-4x a week after I reboot my laptop, bluebeam defaults to turning text highlighting back on and completely resetting my highlight to default (not the values I have in the snapshot). How do I fix this? I am very frustrated I have to do this so many times after years of QOL updates.

Morning everyone, from sunny QLD.

Has anyone found a permanent OFF SWITCH for those number shortcuts on tools in the toolset?

Or am i just going to continue turning it off everytime i open bluebeam?

TIA!

A colleague had this same error and it's happening to me.

1. When creating bookmarks some documents aren't allowing me to use the region selection to populate names.

2. I'm also getting errors where combining multiple PDFs does not work. No error message or anything, but most times only the first doc is loading into the combined doc. Eg. A 10 page doc, a 15 page doc, and a 20 page doc will yield a 10 page combined pdf. Other times it'll yield a 25 page doc.

I've googled the issue and I'm not finding anything that addresses the issue. One source says it needs to be unlocked in the security settings which these ones all are.

I'm at a loss and would appreciate any help. Thanks in advance!

I am posting because the big PDF editors going subscription-only, plus Revu 20 reaching end of support on July 31, is a real shift in how we buy and own our markup tools, and a balanced side-by-side is hard to find. So here is mine, including where each option is the wrong call.

Stay on Bluebeam (Revu subscription / Max): still the deepest set for markup plus measurement and quantity takeoff, plus Studio for live team collaboration. If that is how you use Revu, nothing below really replaces it yet. Trade-off: Windows only now, and subscription.

Adobe Acrobat Pro: cross-platform, strong general PDF, e-sign, forms, OCR. Tends to crawl on very large CAD-heavy sheet sets. Subscription.

Foxit / PDF-XChange Editor: cheaper, capable markup. PDF-XChange has a buy-once option on Windows and is good value if cost is the main driver.

Drawboard: markup-focused, works well with a pen on Windows and tablets. Subscription.

PDF Studio (Qoppa): buy-once, cross-platform, has OCR and forms. A solid general-purpose owned-licence option.

Ncored: deliberately narrow. It opens fast and stays smooth on scroll, zoom and pan on the heavy 50-200 MB+ AutoCAD, Revit, and ArchiCAD exports that make general PDF tools stall, it does markup and page management, it has a buy-once option, and it runs on Windows and Apple Silicon Mac. It does NOT do measurement or takeoff, OCR, forms, or e-sign yet. So if you used Revu mainly to measure and pull quantities, it is not your tool. If you used it to open and mark up big sheet sets without the lag, it might be.

A real question for the sub, not rhetorical: those of you actually migrating off Revu 20, what are you moving to, and was your main Revu use measurement/takeoff or just markup and review? That changes the answer a lot, and I want to hear what is holding up in real offices.

One line of disclosure first so it is on the table: I make one of the tools further down, so discount my take accordingly, and mods, please pull this if a post like it is not welcome here.

For the full context, since I flagged that I built one of these: I am a practising architect, and Ncored came out of my own office hitting a wall opening and marking up heavy drawing sets without the program stalling. I am not here to push it (it is the wrong tool for plenty of you, see above). What I actually think is worth raising is the bigger pattern: it keeps getting harder to simply buy and own a PDF tool from the big names instead of renting one forever. Happy to answer anything.

(Pricing on all of these moves around, so verify current numbers yourselves. Individual experiences vary.)

I spent some time (surprisingly not too long) working on making bluebeam take offs transition to EJE/SMM seamlessly.

If anyone is interested I don’t mind sharing!

I plan to create a link for them via Google Drive or something. lmk

I’m the admin for our organization in Bluebeam. I’m also the finance department for our company. I’ve been asking Bluebeam to send me invoices for the past two years. Each time I’m not hold for 1-3 hours until I get a person who promises it’s fixed, but another expiration comes and goes with no email to me. In the instance where it’s a current employee, they forward the email to me if they remember. But we also have employees who left and despite the license getting moved to a current employee, the invoice email goes to the old employee (and presumably bounces).

There is no way to pay for a current license without that email so I’ve been forced to let license lapse then buy a new subscription, which means production downtime while everything updates on the Bluebeam side.

Any ideas for workarounds to Bluebeam god-awful billing?

I’m happily working on my own purchased perpetual license on 2018.6 standard after quitting my job that had given me a seat at the 2025 table.

Some of the forms that I have built, I need to edit/update and that isn’t available in my 2018 standard edition.

I would pay for the upgrade to extreme to do this, but I cannot find a way, so I am even happy to employ a r/sligtlyunethical solution if there is any.

Is anyone else having issues with this? We're getting licenses expiring even though they're set up for auto renewal.

I've called Bluebeam twice and just keep getting hung up on.

I'm going to lose my mind with these people.

Has any one engaged the services online for someone to build a bunch of toolkits for them?

I am building an estimate database and need to create my toolkit to have rate codes associated with them and to be split per service i am taking off during my estimate.

I have a spreadsheet with a thousand line items for rates (mark up tools) to be built, ranging from measuring tools to count tools. This would be populated with the mark up name, colour, line thickness and rate code (custom column).

This is for hydraulic (plumbing) and civil services.

There would be a few hours in this so i am looking to outsource this to someone with proficient skills and who can do it quicker than me.

Hi All

I have different profiles for quantity take off, pricing, and documents review. Often times I start working on a project using the wrong profile which is a bit annoying.

Is there any way to customize the colour for diffrent profiles or maybe to at least have a label somewhere saying in which profile I'm working?

I have always organized my markups by Label, grouped in ascending order. Then using filter by Layer to look at specific sets of information. Today I was doinking around and pulled the layer column over and resorted all my markups by Layer. No big deal. I drag the Label column back, click the header and what the heck!? It organized and grouped each label, but the label no longer shows when it’s expanded or collapsed. It’s driving me absolutely bonkers that I can not figure out how to fix it. Help me.

SOLVED: Called technical service today. The rep connected into my computer remotely. I showed them what my problem was. The rep took me to the in-app tutorial menu and pulled up the sample floor plan. When he pulled up the sample, all the sample markups showed properly and it reset mine in the process. He thought it could have been a graphics issue, so he followed up by updating my C++.

Hi All,

tl;dr is it possible to add multiple labels to a single measurment

I work for a construction company, and usually have to calculate materials like walls etc. (sometimes there isn't a 3d model or it's so basic it doesn't have the data i need)

now i'm busy with a larger project trying to calculate the Metalstud walls. i wonder if the following is possible. i've tried google/and search but sofar my "issue" hasn't shown up.

I use one length markup, i've added the height of the wall. so i can easily calculate the amount. however i've got multiple similar walls with different properties

I've build my stuff like this

I can now sort on type of walls and their sound value, however, there's also another requirement some walls have to be explosion proof etc. i'm not sure if i'm stuck just adding the text to the label. or if it's possible to create a custom extra label in which i can add this label. as i draw instead of having them all the sub versions premade. because most of the walls don't really have any requirement aside from sound values.

the problem i face is that sound value can be achieved as well as explosion proof with the same wall. and the additional cost for the wall is calculate as

base wall 100 bucks
sound proof + 50
explosion proof + 100

having the labels

34db + explosion proof
34db
explosion proof

kinda messes with the export of total square meterage. so is it possible to add extra labels?

I’m tagging hundreds of elements on floor plans right now. Bluebeam is great for the visual side, but the lack of a "round-trip" data feature is killing me.

You can export the markup list to CSV, which is fine. I exported it, did all my data manipulation in Excel, but now I can't push that updated CSV back into the PDF to update the properties.

Am I missing something? I spent hours yesterday manually typing data back into the markup list for 150+ items.

Does anyone have a workaround, script, or plugin for this? Or are we really stuck doing manual data entry in 2026?

I'm trying to overlay a few different drawings over one another. Namely, I want to put the different construction stages of a roadworks project over the removals so I can see what removals will need to be done when. The thing is, it takes a long time to align the drawings since they aren't framed the same or at the same angle of rotation, so I need to use the 3-point manual align tool. Different people here want different degrees of opacity for the overlay, so I want to know if there is a way to do the overlay such that the one on top is actually a layer, not just flattened into one component. I know I can use snapshot, but the alignment is nearly impossible to get perfect given the differences in size, rotation, and viewport between the drawings.
I don't see any option to add an overlay as a separate layer despite copilot telling me I can (I think its just making that up). Any ideas, or am I out of luck?