Pro's Picks: Bluebeam Revu

Chris Morris

Assistant Project Manager, Executive Construction 

Chicago, Ill. 

There are three key steps when working on any project: define, manage, and optimize. No matter the size of the project or the team, the Bluebeam Revu PDF editing and collaboration program lets us do all three, and more. 

With Bluebeam, we have the freedom to view all documents related to a project in a single program. No longer do we have to lug around printed blueprints to every jobsite. 

All team members have real-time access to the project through Bluebeam, though there can be some lag when multiple users are live on one file, particularly with our larger files.  

If you need to look up a particular symbol (let’s say you need to find every lightbulb in a project), you can select that symbol on one page, and Bluebeam will search the rest of the pages for it.

You can also select any portion of a document and link a photo right into the PDF. For example, if you have a wall that’s got a missing strip of paint, you can snap a photo on site and link it to that spot in the PDF. It’s much easier than writing out a paragraph and sending an email detailing what you saw. 

One of my favorite features is the overlay option. It’s easy for small changes to get lost from one version of a drawing to the next, but using the overlay function lets us compare the old and new versions, with changes highlighted.

Being on the jobsite might feel like organized chaos most of the time, but using Bluebeam to manage our documents and workflow lends a little method to the madness.