What’s New With Trimble LiveCount Digital Takeoff Software
Trimble LiveCount™ cloud-based digital takeoff software is designed to help electrical contractors create estimates faster, easier, and more accurately. Construction is a competitive industry with tight deadlines. That’s why each month, Trimble introduces new features and improvements to our LiveCount software to help our customers keep up with those deadlines and stay a step ahead of their competition.
Here are some of the recently released features that highlight how LiveCount keeps getting better so our customers can too.
Improvements to Styles:
Creating and customizing Styles in LiveCount has never been easier, allowing greater flexibility and speed during takeoff. New Job-specific Styles complement the existing Company-wide Styles, which are available to all users and can be used as templates. With Job-specific Styles, changes will apply only to the current job, thereby offering greater flexibility when doing takeoff. To simplify and speed up finding and selecting a Style, users can now Organize Styles by Industry, where only Styles that have the same industry as the estimate will be visible from within a job, resulting in a shorter list. Plus, the Styles dropdown menu also includes a filter to further refine options. To help speed up the creation of new Styles, users can also now duplicate existing Styles, which can then be easily used as a starting point for the new Style.
Drawing Compare enhancements:
The recent releases have expanded the capabilities of Drawing Compare to make it easier and more productive when reviewing updates to drawings during the course of a project. The Drawing Compare function can be used to compare two drawings that both contain annotations or a new (empty) drawing against a drawing with annotations.
In addition, users can now save Overlays, i.e., the image of the two drawings – one on top of the other– during drawing comparison for future reference and use. All overlays associated with the drawing that is currently selected will be shown in the Drawing Compare side panel. Users have the option of making the overlays visible on the screen, making it easier to view what has changed and adjust the takeoff as needed. The overlays can also be saved as a PDF to facilitate sharing with other stakeholders.
Efficiency gains using Auto Count and Keyboard Shortcuts:
The Auto Count feature saves you valuable time by letting LiveCount do tedious counting tasks for you. The recent enhancements to Auto Count expand that functionality to further speed up takeoff. Users can now perform a secondary search outside of the original primary search area, providing greater flexibility. The new Draw & Continue option allows users to draw selected results directly from the results window. This is especially convenient when selecting and drawing from different groups of results.
The Layer can now also be set from the Auto Count Returned Results window before drawing the results, thereby helping ensure counts are placed appropriately according to the user’s needs. When repeating Auto Count searches, the Layer and Style from the original search are retained and used when drawing the results on other drawings for greater consistency.
In addition to Auto Count enhancements, a new Rename Drawing Keyboard Shortcut is now available, giving users the ability to quickly rename the current drawing from the takeoff window. This keyboard shortcut can be customized in the Keyboard Shortcuts Settings (default key = F2).
Greater control over annotations:
Several recent updates help simplify the creation and management of annotations. Now, all annotation types can be locked and unlocked to help users avoid accidentally moving or editing annotations. In addition, the Selection Outline setting has been expanded to apply to not only length annotations but also count annotations to help users more easily identify their counts on the drawing or when selecting an item via the estimating application.
Lastly, the Include in Count and Exclude from Count options have been added to the right-click menu to help make changes to counts easier and faster. These options were previously only available in the Annotation Details side panel. By adding this functionality to the right-click menu, users have more options and flexibility to work the way they want.
Availability
Trimble LiveCount is included in the Accubid Anywhere and Accubid Classic Estimating Essentials subscriptions. For more information or to request a demo, please contact us at mep.trimble.com/get-in-touch.