Sort, filter, and group tools - Accubid Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's go to the extension screen and talk about sorting, filtering, and grouping some of the items there. Click on the extension tab below. Here we see the extension screen. You'll notice everything's lined up in numbers from one going all the way down to as many items as we have. The white cells are editable. That means we can change them. We can change the number, the price, the name, even the labor, to customize our estimate the way we want to. There's some important tools in the extension screen that help you sort, filter, and group these items. We'll start by sorting. Let's say for instance, I want to sort the total material price of all of the items in my estimate. I simply click on the column like this, then I go over here, and I can sort by ascending, meaning starting with the lowest value, or sort descending, with the highest value. Let's start descending, and look at that. Total material starts with the most expensive material going all the way down to material that actually has no value entered at all right now. That could be a mistake or a problem. I could click on this and sort by ascending also, and it pretty much reverses the process. The lowest value things are at the top. To clear that and return to the normal state, I simply click on clear sort. Now you can also sort by quantity, by date, by trade prices, by just about every column here if you want to. I'll click on quantity and sort descending. Look at that. The highest number of items I have is this CAT6 UTP cable. I have 7,000 feet. Going further down, things get a little bit smaller, smaller, and smaller all the way down to the value of one, but they're out of order, over here. I'll clear sort, and everything's back to normal again. Play around with that. Now, another useful tool is the availability of filtering. Click on the filter extension, and you're going to be able to filter all the items on the extension screen based on your own needs. When you click on it, it will open up this quick view window. Now, you can filter it by material conditions like normal, halted, quoted, that type of thing. Same with labor, or you could also filter by dates that you've entered things, or even price codes. But my opinion, the most valuable way of filtering things is by quantities, by prices, and by labor. Let's say, for instance, I want to know if I have any material that is between $1 and $5.50. I'll enter those, click OK, and you'll notice everything disappeared that's not within that filter range. All of these items total up to be within that filter range. Not bad. Now watch this. I could also go back to filter extension and add an additional filtering option to the same filter. Let's say total material of $1 to 5.50 remains, but I want to put in a quantity of anything that's one to 20. I should probably lose a few things when I apply this filter, and I did. I had some things that were over 100, and they're gone. So now this is really like a double filter or a filter that's filtering by material and quantity. I can click on filter extension again, click on the clear all button, that will go away. I'll click OK, and everything comes back to normal. Play around with the filter option. It's very useful and you can find a lot of items in particular categories, however you enter them. One other tool in the extension screen is the ability to group similar items. Click on the group extension. Here in the quick view, you'll notice that you can group particular items based on some of the takeoff criteria, job, drawing, area. Remember? We did those earlier. Let's go to system. I know that we took off some of the things in systems or by systems. I'll click add. It'll bring that group into an order over here. I'll show you more about that in a minute. I'll click OK, and what you'll see is pretty much a grouping order here, the different systems that I took off things in. You'll notice everything's yellow when you group. That means you can't edit any of these cells, but you can view by them. We took off a lot of items in lighting. If I want to see what's in that lighting group, I simply left-click twice on that. And now I'm seeing the extension screen like you normally would see it, but all in yellow. You can't edit in this, but what you can do is view the items that are only in that particular group, which happens to be lighting. Now, to get out of this or to return to the grouping, you simply right-click, go to group, and click OK. Now I have branch wiring or phone and computer. I can simply look at those things if I want to, or right-click group, OK, and go back. That's how you use the group function. It could really be used for a lot of different criteria. If you want to, you can actually double group. I could group by system and by bid item if I want to. I'll have system at the top and then bid item below. Now, there's kind of a hierarchy here. You'll see what I mean in a minute. I'll click OK. It looks pretty much the same. However, when I double-click on lighting, you'll notice that I go to the base bid item. Basically I sorted by the group, and then by the particular bid item. You could do that by drawing, by area, by all the other attributes that you take off by. If I want to clear all of this, I simply click on group extension, I can click remove or remove all, and when I click OK, we should go right back to my extension screen. And there it is in the normal status. That's how you use sort, filter, and group. I encourage you to build a decent estimate with a lot of attributes and play around with these different tools and see how handy they are for you to find the information you want quickly. I think you'll use them a lot.