What happened to Bluebeam Vu?

- [Jim] Hi, Jim Rogers here. And this week's Bluebeam trick is how to use Bluebeam for free. Now, don't get too excited. You're not gonna be able to use Bluebeam Revu for free, beyond the trial period anyway, but there used to be a program called Bluebeam Vu that was free, and allowed you to have a lot of the same functionality and user interface when working with PDFs, or large format PDFs like construction drawings. But it didn't cost anything, and it was called Bluebeam Vu.

If you click here under solutions, you'll see browse by product, it doesn't exist anymore. The only thing they have is Revu, Revu for Mac and Revu for iPad. Now, this might come as a shock to some people because many people used Bluebeam Vu in their office for users who didn't need the full markup functionality that's available in Revu. And Bluebeam Vu was also the product that somebody could install and have all of the functionality and markup features when they were working on a collaborative document inside of a Bluebeam Studio session.

So if you're not aware of this and you want to get more information on that, make sure you check out that chapter of my Learning Bluebeam course here in the online library. Now even though you don't see Bluebeam Vu listed here anymore, and it is gone, they don't have that as a separate standalone product, you can still use Bluebeam Revu for free in the View Only mode, and that's what I'm gonna show you how to do. So let's get rid of the internet browser here.

And we're here in Bluebeam Revu 2018 for Windows. And if I go over here to the upper left corner and click on the Revu menu, you'll see that this tells me because it's highlighted here that I'm in Markup Mode. Now it also has a new View Mode that didn't used to exist. If I click on View Mode my screen changes a little bit and you'll see my toolbar is now undocked and all of my markup tools are grayed out.

It says review is now in View Mode. You may continue to view PDFs and participate in studio sessions. But for the full functionality of reviews, which to Markup Mode from the Review menu. So I'm gonna click on okay. This is now basically what used to be Bluebeam Vu. This is the free version of Bluebeam Revu where you don't get all the markup tools. Now, if you have people in the office who used to use Bluebeam Vu and want to upgrade to get this new user interface but you obviously cannot find Bluebeam Vu 2018 because it doesn't exist, the way you get it and the way you get that same funtionality of the free program, is by going ahead and either upgrading or having someone install the full version of Bluebeam Revu on their computer.

Once Bluebeam Revu is installed on their computer, it's gonna ask them to register that program. They're gonna see a screen that looks similar to this. And they're gonna click on this button here that would say in their case, use as trial. When they click on use as trial, they're gonna get actually a fully functional version of Bluebeam Revu for 30 days, but then when that expires, they're gonna still be able to continue to use this program, but in View Only mode.

If they decide to switch later, or upgrade to the full version with all the markup capabilities they're gonna purchase that product and enter a serial number and product key and they'll click on register. And that will allow them, as is my case here to then switch between that View Only mode and the markup mode. And so again, for those of you who previously used the free Bluebeam Vu product or like I said, maybe you have copies of Vu installed in your office for users who don't require those full markup capabilities, or that just participate in Bluebeam studio sessions, not to worry.

Even though that Vu product has disappeared from the Bluebeam website, you can still upgrade those users who were using Vu to the latest version of Revu and get the same free functionality by working in View Only mode.