One of my responsibilities at Bluebeam is to demonstrate Revu at trade shows – lots and lots of trade shows. It’s actually kind of ironic, because I really hate flying. But I digress. Every time I’m at a trade show, it never fails; someone will ask me “So, what makes Bluebeam different from Adobe?”
I love this question.
You see, when I talk about how we’re different from Adobe, I get to demo some cool features, and show how Revu makes it a lot easier to edit PDFs than “you know who” does. So today, I thought I’d share with you 3 tools in Revu that I think are really cool.
Cool Tool #1 – The Tool Chest
The Tool Chest is a proprietary feature that let’s you save custom markups across sessions, so you can reuse later with just one click. This means you don’t have to recreate markups and change their properties settings every time you need to use them – how cool is that?
You see, the Tool Chest is comprised of various Tool Sets – portable files that you can import, export, save to your hard drive or email – that contains your custom markups. It’s really easy to create your own Tool Set, too. I made one. It has my signature and some different colored check boxes, because I tend to fill out PDF order forms a lot. And it also has a screenshot of Yoda, you know, just for fun.
I've saved some commonly used (and fun) annotations in my Tool Set.
All joking aside, the Tool Chest really can save you a lot of time. In fact, it helped this user speed up document review by 60%. Check it out!
Cool Tool #2 – The Markups List
The Markups List is a tool that tracks all comments made on a document, in, you guessed it, list format. It captures information such as the markup type, color, author, date/time, page number and more.
Track, sort, filter and summarzie comments in Bluebeam's Markups List
But the coolest thing about the Markups List is that once you have a document with comments, the possibilities are endless. Import and export comments from other reviewers, summarize to CSV, XML or PDF, filter, respond and more. Here are some creative ways customers use the Markups List:
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Creating punch lists for construction projects by importing in all comments, creating a PDF summary, and appending it to the original PDF – with hyperlinks.
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Quickly changing properties settings for multiple markups. For example, if you need to change all your red text markups to blue, you can go to the Markups List, sort by markup type, multi-select the red text markups and change them to blue.
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Creating a CSV summary of measurement annotations, and performing additional calculations in Excel.
Cool Tool #3 – Flattening
Have you ever marked up a PDF, sent it off and had the recipient call you and say your markups didn’t print? Well, the recipient is probably viewing and printing the PDF from Adobe. And for some reason, Acrobat defaults to printing the document only, not the document and comments. Smart, huh?
Of course, you could tell this person to just download and use Bluebeam, but I realize it isn’t always kosher to tell others (i.e., really important clients) what software to use. So you need to prevent this situation from happening in the first place. Don’t worry; we’ve already got a plan. Our Flattening feature makes your markups become a permanent, unchangeable part of the file. This means when you email it out, you can rest assured that your markups will print, even if the PDF is being printed from Adobe. You can even Unflatten later to make markups active again, so you can edit, move or delete them.
Of course, there are a lot of other cool things that differentiate Bluebeam from Adobe (ahem, price, cough), but these three features – the Tool Chest, the Markups List and Flattening – are some of my favorites. So tell me, what do you think about these Cool Tools? What other features would you add to this list? And remember, keep on PDF’ing!
Karen
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