Using the Hyperlink tool

- [Instructor] In this week's episode of Bluebeam Tips and Tricks I want to continue on the productivity theme and talk about another little trick for speeding through a set of construction documents. Anyone that works in the AEC industry, that's Architecture, Engineering and Construction, spends a lot of time working with project plans like the ones I've got open on the screen here. But there are also a lot of documents we work with like project specifications and submittal documents and we also end up needing to access data on different websites. Now wouldn't it be nice if we could just click on the drawings we're working with and have there be a link that jumps to the website we need or opens the document we want to review? Well we can do just that using the hyperlink tool in Bluebeam Revu.

Let's take a look. We'll go back to our cover page here and first let's figure out where this hyperlink tool is located. Well it's a tool so it's going to be located under the Tools menu here at the top of the screen. We'll go ahead and click that and if you follow that drop down menu you'll see Hyperlink. So we want to go ahead and click on the Hyperlink tool and I'll show you several different ways that we can use this. One way we can use this is to turn text into a hyperlink. So let's zoom in to the words LinkedIn Learning on our construction drawing.

As I get close to that you'll see my cursor change from cross hairs into a text select tool. It's doing that automatically. I'm not changing any buttons or anything. So go ahead and hold the mouse button down, the left mouse button down, and drag that text select tool over our words LinkedIn Learning and when we let the mouse button go, a dialogue box opens up and it asks us what kind of hyperlink we want to plug in here. Well we can add hyperlinks to jump to other sheets or places or spaces in our document.

We can also jump to a snapshot view, some zoomed in view on the construction drawings themselves. But what I want to look at right now is adding a hyperlink. So I want to go ahead and hyperlink the text LinkedIn Learning to our website, linkedin.com/learning. And we'll click on okay. Let's go ahead and get our select tool back. Now when we have our cursor moving around the drawing and I get close to the words LinkedIn Learning, I change from an arrow to this little hand symbol showing that I have something I can click on.

And if I hover over that it'll show me that this is going to open up the LinkedIn Learning website and since I have my global settings defaulted to opening up web tabs here in Bluebeam, I open up LinkedIn Learning right here without even having to leave Bluebeam. Let's go ahead and close that web tab and zoom back out and take a look at a couple more things that we can do with that tool. If I click on Tools and select Hyperlink again besides just hyperlinking text, I can hyperlink images or anything I want to by actually drawing a box around it using the cursor.

So when I do that and I release the mouse button it opens that same dialogue box and we can do things like let's go ahead and hyperlink to a map page that shows us where this particular project's located. We'll click on paste because I've already found that map link and we'll click on okay, choose our select tool down here at the bottom of the screen and again, now as I'm moving about the document I've created a link to LinkedIn Learning and I've created a link now to a map of this project.

Let's go ahead and click that. Again it opens a web tab right here in Bluebeam to show us where our project is located. Let's close that and I want to give you one more example and that is opening different documents. So it's not just being able to navigate through this set of construction drawings or being able to jump to websites, but I can also add links to open different documents. So let's zoom in to the Table of Contents here and let's add something to our Table of Contents.

I'm going to come over here and add a text box. We'll click on that and draw a quick text box here, and click inside that and I'm going to go ahead and add the words, and I'm just using the text box markup tool here, I'm going to add the words, let's do Project Specs. Then we'll choose our select tool. So all I've done at this point is I have added some more text to our Table of Contents here, called Project Specs but now I want to go ahead and use that same hyperlink tool to draw a box around our new text and I want to use the Open option here and I'm going to click on the three dots here to find the spec book that I want to be able to open right here from my construction drawings.

So when I click on the three dots, it opens up in my case, a file explorer. Now you can also open up documents that are located in Bluebeam Studio and in order to do that you're going to need to change your global settings to default from opening files from your computer to opening files from Bluebeam Studio. And if you don't remember how to do that, check out one of my other Weekly Tips and Tricks episodes called Setting Global Preferences.

But for now let's go ahead and link to our indoor air quality specs. We'll click on Open and then click on okay. Now we've added text to our Table of Contents and that text when we click on it, is going to open up a project specification book. So again as I'm moving the cursor around the screen, you'll see here it changes to a clickable link and if I click on that I open up my project specifications. So you start to be able to see that with a little bit of setup time up front, you can take your initial set of drawings and you can add hyperlinks like this throughout the entire set of plans so that you have links to other documents and websites built right into the drawings that you're working with every day.

I will tell you this is especially helpful when you're working with these digital drawings out in the field and you want quick access. Now also don't forget that when you add these markups like this they get transferred to any revised sheets that get issued, as long as you insert those sheets into the set using the slip sheet features in Bluebeam. Now that's really a topic all on its own so that conversation will have to wait for another episode but in the meantime, if you want to learn about slip sheeting, check out my course called Bluebeam Managing Construction Drawings Digitally.

That's it for this week, thanks for watching, and I'll be back with more tips and tricks next week.