Paperless Remote Working

[Trenno]

I'm sure we've all spent a considerable amount of the last 12 months working remotely without access to the office printer and therefore being forced to work paperlessly.

Interested to hear other's experiences about how you've either struggled or adapted with new ways of working with various software.

An example that springs to mind is creating clickable hyperlinks within Bluebeam so you can flick between GA section markers and the actual section. Mimicking physically flicking back and forth through a large set of paper drawings.

 

[Enable]

I am and will always be a fan of paper. Through the pandemic I have continued to print large scale drawings for home use. Instead of a plotter though I sub it out to a local shop.

I also have a tri-monitor (24" each) where I can simultaneously look at plans, sections, etc on multiple screens. Combined with the paper it works really well and I can't envisioning myself changing!

 

[LittleInch]

A mixture of buying a decent A3 printer and sheet feed scanner to scan markups and markups using pdf comments software with written comments and some red line changes.

At least two screens needed!

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[phamENG]

I've been in search of the paperless workflow for a long time. Sadly I've never had the time to really set it up. To be better than paper, it has to be as fast as or faster than what you can do on paper. When I'm sketching out details, I can do it faster on a piece of paper and feed it into a scanner than I can draw it with CAD. If I'm marking up somebody else's drawings, bluebeam works really well...but only if you have your own tool box set up. The moment you need to do something "custom" it takes time from the process. This is an area where a little time invested is worth a lot of return, but so far the short term consequences of the lost time has prevented me from doing it. So I still hobble along with a "whatever I grab first" method.

 

[LittleInch]

My youngest son in University set out to be paperless but he uses an i pad Pro(A4 size) with an apple pencil to mark up pdfs and notes.

That seems to work the same as making notes on paper.

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[phamENG]

Yep. I was hoping to do something similar. But when I was shopping for a laptop last year, I wanted something that would let me do that AND run engineering software. Most of the reviews I found said that they could but that the experience wasn't great. None of the 2-in-1s had the muscle for it. If only I'd waited. The 2021 2-in-1s now seem to have a line of higher powered machines that can do it. You have to pay for them, but the cost difference over what I paid for mine would have been worth it.

 

[BridgeSmith]

When I can't get to the office to make prints to mark up for corrections, I use the comment tools in Acrobat Reader to redline details. It's considerably slower than redlining with a pen and scanning the prints, but I'm getting better at it...I think.

Rod Smith, P.E., The artist formerly known as HotRod10

 

[Agent666]

Our office was 95% paperless well before covid and working from home came along.

A mixture of bluebeam and onenote is what is generally used for calculations and drawing markups. When I first joined the company I though I'd hate it working electronically. But I actually enjoy stringing together calcs electronically on a Microsoft surface Pro, being able to cut and paste from documents or analysis programs is super easy. I'm a big surface pencil user, preferring to write/scribble on the screen to produce hand calcs/sketches, but others are all electronically typing everything. I very much prefer the flow of my calculations as I feel the handwritten calcs show more of my thought process.

The only downsides are sometimes the damn thing gets super hot and you feel like your hands going to melt or something, and they are a bit fragile (cracked my screen the other day when I accidentally dropped my phone onto the corner of the metal surround around the screen, still works though!).

We struggled during our first lockdown in March last year to find an efficient workflow for getting markups to be drawn more than anything else. Everyone was doing their own thing for a while and it was utter chaos and markups were falling through the cracks. But this was more around the different means of communication required when you're not sitting right next to someone. Once we sorted that out with a structured methodology for markups that everyone was happy to follow and storing them religiously in our document management system using a structured naming and revision system, its been far more plain sailing. The practice has continued once we were back in the office. But most of us still work from home 2 days a week even though there are no covid cases in the country,

I personally have not printed a single sheet of paper for over a year now. We still scribble and brainstorm on paper if we're in the office, but if working remotely a teams session and drawing in bluebeam or onenote is more than sufficient.

I also created a large number of bluebeam toolsets to share with all the staff which make electronic markups much more efficient as well. Stuff like all the structural steel sections, local timber sections, local timber connection components, etc.

https://engineervsheep.com

 

[dauwerda]

Trenno, per your example, rather than try to "flick" back and forth, I utilize multiple monitors and will have the document opened in two windows so I can see both the plan view and the section view at the same time. Bluebeam is definitely the go to for marking up PDF's and creating quick sketches (AutoCAD for the more detailed sketches). I have a three monitor set-up at the office and in my home office - I can't imagine trying to be productive with anything less than two monitors, unless printing things as well.

 

[KootK]

For changes of scenery, I tend to work a couple of hours each day away from my desk. Patio, dining room, pub... This means the laptop and, at first, the lack of multiple monitors was killing me. Then I got handy with virtual desktops in Windows. It was clumsy at first but, once I got used to it, it was pretty much as good as having multiple monitors. It's not as though you actually view multiple monitors simultaneously most of the time. Rather, you turn your head. So, instead of turning my head, I bust out a key combo to get to the other screens. It's been a nice solution for the laptop. I may even downsize to a single monitor at my main desk when it comes time to start replacing stuff.

A colleague has set up this thing whereby he rents blazing fast computer space from a server farm someplace for peanuts each month. He installs all of his fancy software there where the graphics cards and such are top of the line (it's meant for gamers). Now he just works from his high resolution Chromebook wherever he's at by remoting into the server farm. I would have thought that internet speeds would have rendered such a thing too choppy for graphical applications but it seems to work pretty great.

I'm halfway through a biography on Leonardo da Vinci. Man that guy could sketch! And think through things insanely well by way of sketching well. This has me feeling good about my reluctance to go paperless when I feel the need to really be creative with detailing etc. For that, I like a fresh piece of quality paper and my high end scanner.

 

[Celt83]

I'm still on my gen 1 Surface Pro or Wacom tablet if on the office machine. Do all my calculations in Onenote with custom Letter or Tabloid page templates to match our company computation pads which allows for copy pasting of snippets from other tools using the windows snipping tool. For drawing markups like everyone else use Bluebeam, after they got bought by Nemetschek the program and support has been pretty garbage, hoping for the day when some more folks jump in to help program Sumatra and get measuring and markup tools working. For detail sketches I tend to use Autodesk Sketchbook as it gets pretty close to feeling like drawing on paper, has stencil tools like french curves etc., and if you spend some upfront time making some custom brushes can generate details pretty quick although not to any particular scale.

...virtual desktops...

good to see Microsoft pulled this from the linux world, I used to use virtual desktops a lot when I was experimenting with the various linux distros several years back. They can be very handy when screen space is limited.

A colleague has set up this thing whereby he rents blazing fast computer space from a server farm someplace for peanuts each month.

I'd be very interested to hear more about this if your colleague wouldn't mind sharing details about their setup.

My Personal Open Source Structural Applications:

https://github.com/buddyd16/Structural-Engineering

Open Source Structural GitHub Group:

https://github.com/open-struct-engineer

 

[KootK]

I believe that it's called Shadow and costs $15/mo. The big question with it becomes licensing. The software is presently being used consistently with the spirit of the licensing agreements but, were the software vendors to truly understand the nature of the thing, I doubt they'd be happy with the setup. I suspect RISA's model of an infinitely sharable, web accessed license key will be the way of the future but we're not there yet.

 

[hotmailbox]

Wow, now I don't see the need to upgrade my PC with this Shadow thing considering how affordable it is. Just learnt a new thing today.

 

[KootK]

As a small setup, I very much like the idea of somebody else doing my hardware upgrades, backing up my data, and fighting the good fight in terms of cyber security. Kinda like having an IT departartment.

 

[Aesur]

I have been mostly paperless for years now and am looking at either going back to paper or using Bluebeam on a Surface tablet. I currently use a custom built gaming computer setup with two monitors and it seems no matter how many monitors I have, I want more. I really like the tablet idea because with that I will spend less on ink and paper and cut out having to scan documents, additionally the tablet will allow me to at the least redline, respond to emails, etc. when traveling without having to carry around my 13 pound laptop.

In response to KootK above about using a rented virtual computer, I wanted to point out that I have seen a few software developers catch on already where their software will not work if you remote into a computer. So far it's been specialized software and hasn't affected the most commonly used software; however this is partly why (apart from more money with sub based billing) that many software companies are going to virtual computer and online software. I expect what we will see in the next few years is most software will have their own in house online subscription based virtual computer setup that we will all slowly convert to using.

 

[hotmailbox]

With Autodesk launching web-based Revit (I saw demo) in near future, we won't need a super computer in house anymore.

 

[KootK]

I can't wait for web based software delivery to become the norm. There's obviously a large contingent of folks who still want perpetual licensing. And I get that. For me, I'm happy to pay the subscription fees so long as my seat can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, with only one kid in the pool.

 

[hotmailbox]

I agree with KootK. This may be worth another thread but I think subscription-based licensing scheme is fair for software developers. Developers for structural engineering software companies don't make as much as those working for Facebook, Google,... For all who are already settled with their own engineering business, I don't think the cost of all subscription they need cost more than 3% to 5% of their revenues. And I am happy to pay that amount just like liability insurance every year.

Go back to the topic: I use Bluebeam Studio Session exclusively for drawing markups, coordination with construction teams. I use Surface for hand markups as needed. I haven't printed a sheet of drawings for 2 years. It's been working great so far.

 

[structuralCADspecialist]

I'm fine tuning a way to use CAD programs in such a way to mark-up documents, creating a similar end result to Bluebeam mark-ups. Bluebeam is convenient but quite slow. Especially when people try to utilize it as an actual drafting program.

Basically what I do: Import/attach the PDF to my DWG file. Scale it as needed, and mark away.

The advantages over Bluebeam:

It's faster and less laggy - I can choose how many pages to include in each file rather than being forced to mess around with a giant 100-page PDF file (yes you can break them up in Bluebeam but that's extra work). Since I know AutoCAD quite well I can utilize all the time-saving features I would normally be using within the program anyways.

And I have more flexibility to draw/mark-up exactly as I want. I can make custom content like dynamic blocks a lot quicker than stuff in Bluebeam. It's more 'manual' perhaps but quicker. Sometimes by "quicker" I mean slightly quicker but with less lag; I personally don't handle lag well, so even if the lag isn't slowing me down that much, it bears a bit of a mental burden on me.

I started doing this after trying out a very expensive construction estimating software package. I realized with a little bit of tweaking I could do pretty much everything that program did, but at a much lower cost: Just using a combination of CAD and Excel and fine-tuning it to my specific needs.

Not to say Bluebeam isn't awesome (it is and seems to be getting better each year). Just thought I'd share an alternative especially for those who already know AutoCAD well.

 

[KootK]

@structuralCADspecialist: curious, are an independent CAD/BIM contractor?