Bring your tool chest with you
Most estimators have years in their tool chest. Every shape they bid, with the weight typed in by hand and checked more than once. That work shouldn't be stuck inside one vendor's program. Excalibur View reads it once and keeps it in a plain file you own.
Download Excalibur View freeLoading one
You don't need Revu installed. The file is enough.
- Open Excalibur View and go to File → Load Tool Chest…
- Pick your
.bpxprofile or.btxtool set. The file picker has a filter for Revu files, or you can drag the file onto the window. - The chest opens in the Tool Chest panel on the left, ready to measure with.
From then on it's kept as an .evtools file, which is plain JSON you can open in any text editor. The Revu file isn't needed again.
What comes across
| From a .bpx profile | From a .btx tool set | |
|---|---|---|
| Tools, with their subject, label and colour | Yes | Yes |
| Unit weights and the other column values | Yes | Yes |
| Column names and formulas, like LBS Per FT | Yes | No |
| The markups list's columns | Yes | No |
| Revu's toolbar layout | No | No |
If all you have is a tool set, the values still come through, under Custom 1, Custom 2 and so on. The column names live in the profile, so export the .bpx from Revu's Manage Profiles window while you still have it.
Your weights, not mine
The unit weights are taken exactly as they are in your chest. Excalibur View never swaps in its own section tables, so the tonnage it reports is the tonnage your numbers give.
It finds the weight column by its name. LBS Per FT, PLF, lb/ft and the usual variations all work, so a chest built by another office weighs steel with that office's figures and not somebody else's.
A tool's own scale is ignored when you place it. The sheet's scale is the one used, which is what you want when the same chest works across drawings at 1/4" and 3/8".
Measuring tools come across whole: length, area, count and volume, with their units and rounding. Tools that only mark up, like clouds and callouts, bring their subject and colour. Check those draw the way you expect before you rely on them on a bid.
One chest for the whole office
With the Office server, an administrator opens Studio and presses Share one under Shared tool chests. Every seat picks it up by itself the next time it checks in. Nobody copies files between machines, and nobody ends up bidding off last year's weights.
Sharing works during the 30-day trial and with any Office license. How Office works.
Markups still open in Revu
Markups are saved as ordinary PDF annotations, the way the PDF standard writes them. A set marked up in Excalibur View opens in Revu and Acrobat with everything in place.
On the marked-up set I test every release against, all 46 captions match the ones Revu wrote, character for character. One difference: a quantity multiplier set in Excalibur View is kept where Revu doesn't look, so Revu counts that markup once.
Common questions
Do I need Bluebeam installed to import a tool chest?
No. Excalibur View reads the .bpx or .btx file itself. Revu doesn't need to be on the computer.
Does it work on a Mac?
Yes. The Mac build loads the same files the same way, from File → Load Tool Chest.
Is importing part of the free version?
Yes. Loading a chest is free for one person. Sharing one with every seat in the office is what the Office server adds.
What if I don't have a tool chest?
Build one as you go, or start from one of mine. The structural steel chest has 2,485 shapes with their unit weights already in them. The trade tool chests.
Load your chest and measure something
Free for one person. No account and no email address.