Setting global preferences

- [Jim] Hello, I'm Jim Rogers and this week on Bluebeam tips and tricks, I wanna dig into one of the features that I think is seldom accessed within Bluebeam Revu and that is the preferences settings. So if you are using a version of Bluebeam Revu that was released prior to 2018, your screen is gonna look a little different than this and your preferences are gonna be accessed here. In the top right corner you should see a preferences icon. If you are using Bluebeam Revu 2018 or later you can follow me over here to the Revu menu tab in the upper left corner.

We'll click on that once, get the drop down menu, and select preferences. Now when I click on preferences I open up the preferences window and the first thing you'll notice is there's a lot of different things that can be set here in the preferences tab. We're not gonna look at all of them but I do want to show you a few that I think are really useful. So we'll start here in the general tab looking at different options. For one, I can change my username. This is a name that you set up when you first installed Bluebeam Revu.

If you don't like it, this is where you can go to change it. You can also change the theme or the actual look of Bluebeam Revu. If you followed me here in the weekly series, you might have noticed that I always use the dark theme, and that's what's selected here, but there's also a light theme and if we select that and then click on OK, it'll apply that preference and switch us over to Bluebeam Revu's light theme. I want to go ahead and switch back by opening up preferences again and selecting dark.

I think it's just a little easier on my eyes. We'll click on OK again to apply that and once again open up the preferences dialog box. So again, there's a lot of things that you can do here. I just want to look at a few more. When we click on document, this is handy, we can change the maximum allowable zoom. We can move that up or down. So this could be really useful when you're looking at some detailed drawings and you want to zoom in closer. This is where you change that setting.

I can also, over here on the grid and snap tab, I can choose to always show a grid. So this will superimpose a grid over any documents that we open. And over here on spelling, I can turn spellcheck on or off. And again, anytime you do this, you've got to click on OK to apply whatever changes that you've made. Now if we look over here on the left side of the preferences dialog box, we have interface changes, we have changes for tools, and settings for tools.

I want to go down here to studio because I think this is another one of those handy settings that not a lot of people know about. So here under studio options you'll notice that it says open and save files to studio from the toolbar only and that should typically be checked by default. So it is here in our version of Bluebeam Revu. I'm gonna leave that checked and click on OK because I want to show you what it does. When that box is checked and you click on file and open, it goes right to your Windows Explorer dialog box and looks for you to open up a file from your computer or maybe from one of your network drives if you have those mapped to Windows Explorer.

So I'm gonna click on cancel and show you what happens if we select Revu preferences and we uncheck that dialog box and click on OK. Now when I click on file and open, you'll notice that it did not go to Windows Explorer. Instead it now shows me a list of my project files and I can go ahead and double click on a project file.

Give it just a second to connect because remember this is, all of these projects are in the cloud, and when I do that, now I've opened up this particular studio project and I'm looking at all the folders and files in that studio project. So if you frequently access all of your documents and drawings here in Bluebeam through Bluebeamm Studio, unchecking that box in preferences gives you a quick way to access all of those files and folders. And if you do want to open something directly from your computer, instead of selecting something here and clicking OK, just click on open from disk and it still goes right back to your Windows Explorer dialog box.

So keep in mind that all of these settings under preferences are global functions. So the preferences that you set here stay in your copy of Bluebeam Revu. They don't change based on your profile view or your profile settings. The preference settings are just one more way that you can customize the look and feel of Bluebeam in order to make it work the way you want to work.