Recent Enhancements 2.5-50

These enhancements have been added SINCE Release 2.5. Click here to see the enhancements included in Release 2.5. (Including Pattern Search.)

Pattern Search included in Premier

New in 2.5-63: Pattern Search is now included in the Premier version of eTakeoff. It remains an add-on for Pro and Pro-Plus.

Project Control

eTakeoff organizes drawings by project. It’s fairly easy to manage information within projects. But until now there were no “power tools” for managing large numbers of projects. Now we’ve added more project information and added a project window to let you list, sort and manage projects. Project control features are not available for Basic users.


Figure 1: The Project List Window

Projects can be flagged for “Auto Export” and they will be exported automatically after they are changed. Obsolete projects can be hidden to exclude them from the drop-down project list.

Improved Multi-page File Handling

We’re seeing an increasing number of documents released as a single multi-page PDF file. Often these files have PDF “bookmarks” associated with each page, describing the drawing on that page. We now display these bookmarks as page descriptions in both the drop-down page list in the project toolbar and in the document list in the control panel.


Figure 2: Page Descriptions in the Toolbar and Control Panel

Also, we now save the rotation of individual pages so you don’t have to manually rotate when moving through pages with different rotations.

Gray-scale TIFF Generation

In the past, when PDF files were converted to TIFF files, we created a black and white image. This minimized the storage requirements but made files less readable. We have now added a user option to convert to black and white or gray-scale.

Drawing Legend Enhancements

New in 2.5-66: Drawing Legend options have been added to display measurement detail instead of trace totals and to show/hide Quantity and Unit of Measure columns

Layer Measurement Indicators

The Layer list in the control panel shows the layer description in a bold font if there are measurements or annotations assigned to the layer. This makes it easy to identify hidden information.

New in 2.5-63: An “All” checkbox has been added. This is checked by default and all layers are displayed. If it’s un-checked, layers are displayed only if they have measures and annotations in the current drawing.

New Measurement List Columns

The page number has been added to the Measurement List columns. This makes it possible to see measurement totals by drawing and page.

The “Detail Number” column has also been added. You can sort by this column to see measurements in the sequence in which they were created.

The Measurement List is not available to Basic users.

Extensions

Previously, Extension variables could only be entered via numeric input or checkboxes. Now drop-down lists have been added. When building the extension, you can define a list of descriptions to select from (such as rebar sizes). Values can be associated with each list entry for use in subsequent extension calculations.


Figure 3: Extension Drop-down List

Some of our users have designed extensions that have many calculated values that are only used in special cases. They needed a way to hide these values when they weren’t in use. We added an option to hide calculated values when their value was zero. This option can be selected on a calculation by calculation basis. Hidden values don’t appear in the drop-down quantity list, the Extension Edit Window or the control panel Quantity List.

New in 2.5-63: Ceiling and Floor functions have been added to Extension formulas (as well as Quantity Worksheet formulas.

Extensions are only available to Premier users, Pro-Plus users and Pro users with the Extensions add-on.

Quantity Worksheet Enhancements

New in 2.5-66: Recalculation has been speeded up. In some cases more than tenfold. A Recalculate Project button has been added for use in case recalculation is interrupted.

Quantity Worksheet ConstructionSuite Import/Export

Premier users who also use ConstructionSuite can now import ConstructionSuite estimates to create templates. After using those templates in an eTakeoff project and assigning measurements, they can export the totals back to the ConstructionSuite estimate.

Earlier Enhancements

The enhancements above have been added SINCE Release 2.5. Click here to see the enhancements included in Release 2.5. (Including Pattern Search.)