Measure and takeoff

Measurement in Plan Markup is manual on purpose. There is no auto-takeoff and no symbol detection: you draw every measurement, so you can defend every quantity in the bid. What the app does is make the drawing fast and the arithmetic automatic.

Calibrate the sheet’s scale first. None of this means anything without it.

The three measurement tools

• Length. Press M and click along the run, vertex by vertex. The label shows the running total live, in feet and inches. Hold Shift to snap segments to 45 degrees, and Backspace removes the last vertex if you misclick mid-trace.
• Area. Trace the boundary of a region and get square feet, with the perimeter shown right alongside. One trace, two numbers: the slab and the formwork around it.
• Count. One click per item, each drop a visible tick on the sheet, so a recount later takes seconds.

Measurements are markups like any other: select them, move a vertex, restyle them, delete them, undo. They carry a label, and the label is doing more work than it looks like.

The takeoff panel

Every measurement rolls into the takeoff panel, a drawer along the bottom of the window. It groups by label plus measurement type: all the length runs labeled “6’ chain link” total together, the areas labeled “sod repair” total together, the counts labeled “gate post” total together.

That makes label consistency the whole ballgame. “6’ chain link” and “6’ CL” are two groups, and your total just quietly split in half. The fix is to draw from tool chest presets instead of typing labels by hand: the preset carries the label, so every run it draws lands in the same bucket.

Click any group in the panel and the view jumps to its markups on the sheet, which is how you audit a number you do not quite believe. Drag the drawer’s header to resize it, or click to collapse it to a one-line summary while you draw.

CSV export

Export CSV writes the takeoff straight into a file Excel opens clean: detail rows for each measurement plus the group totals. That file is the handoff to pricing.

Plan Markup itself does not price anything. Quantities and units come out; unit costs, markups, and bid math happen in your workbook or wherever you price. That split is deliberate and permanent. See Limitations and roadmap.

If the bid lives in Contractor Takeoff, the measuring connects there too: Plan Markup embeds as the document viewer, so markups on a bid’s plans live inside that bid’s workspace. See the suite overview.

When the takeoff is done, export the marked-up PDF so the GC sees exactly what you counted.