Make sure Bluebeam Revu is up-to-date

- [Instructor] During the course of recording these weekly tips and tricks, I became aware of the fact that Bluebeam had released a couple of updates to Bluebeam Revu 2018, which is the version of Bluebeam that I happen to be using to record these tips and tricks. I think I looked at an email or saw a news letter that said something like they were releasing 2018.3 for Bluebeam Revu and I decided I better take a look and make sure I'm up to date, so, I went up here to the review tab, clicked once, and then clicked on about in the dropdown menu and I noticed that I'm actually using version 2018.1.

So, it occurred to me that I really need to get this updated and I thought that this would be a good topic for a weekly tip because Bluebeam is one of those programs that will not update itself automatically. In fact, it won't even tell you that there's an update available and walk you through the process. You have to do that yourself. So here's what you do. For one, like I just showed you, you can click on review and about and find out which version you're in at any time. To update yourself, though, go over to the help menu, click that, and select the second item in the dropdown menu, check for updates.

This is going to open a web tab and it's going to go to Bluebeam's website and here it's going to tell me that I am using Bluebeam Revu 2018.1.0 and it looks like 2018.3.4 is actually available. So I can click on this box to go ahead and do that update. Now, when you do that, we'll click once and it's going to open up a explorer dialogue box and ask us where we want to download this at and we'll just click on save and let this download.

Now, once this happens you want to go ahead and navigate back to that file, double click to open and run that file, and go ahead and update your version of Bluebeam Revu. Now, while this is downloading, I also want to take the opportunity to talk to you about why it's so important to periodically do this and make sure that you're up to date. To show you why it's so important to make sure that you're using the latest version of Bluebeam Revu, let's go ahead and click on window and open up another web tab.

We'll go ahead and go to Bluebeam's website at bluebeam.com and I'm going to search for release notes. And select this Bluebeam Revu release notes. It's letting me know that there is a new version available, so let's go ahead and close that dialogue box and let's scroll down and take a look at the different release notes. So, first of all, let's look at major revisions versus minor revisions.

So, minor revisions are anything, in this case, after 2018. So, 2018.1, 2018.2, 2018.3, and then 2018.3.4. Those are considered minor revisions and those are included for free with your Bluebeam Revu license. You should always be able to update within these minor revisions. Now, going from things like jumping from Bluebeam 2017 to Bluebeam 2018, for example, would be considered a major revision and in order to get that for free, you're going to have to have subscribed to the annual maintenance plan, which does include all those major revisions, or you're going to have to purchase an upgrade license to go from '17 to '18.

But let's go ahead and continue scrolling down and get back to my statement about why it's important to stay up to date. If you do search for these release notes, it'll tell you what's been added, so this is a good, quick way to find out, for example, the features that got added or changed from 2017 to 2018, but let's just scroll down and look at these additional improvements and fixes, for example, that were included in 2018.2. So, addressed an issue, addressed an issue, addressed an issue, that's how all of these begin, and look at how long this list is.

And, again, if we go to 2018.1, so this was jumping from 2018.0 to 2018.1, scroll down and look at this list of addressed an issue items. So these are basically all bugs that got fixed in each one of these releases. So when you see this, it becomes really evident as to why it's so important to make sure you're staying up to date so that you aren't experiencing these issues or bugs that they fixed as they continued to update it.

And, again, any time you want to know if you're up to date, just navigate back to that help window, click on check for updates, and make sure you're not getting a screen like this that tells you to update. You want a screen that looks like this and that will tell you that you are good to go and your version of Bluebeam Revu is current and up to date.