Tool chest

The tool chest is where your standards live. A preset is a tool plus its full style plus its label, saved under one name. Instead of picking the line tool, setting red, setting 2 point width, and typing the label every time, you press one key and draw.

A fence estimator’s chest might look like: red 2 point length for 6 foot chain link with top rail and bottom wire, blue for gates, green for temporary fence. A concrete estimator’s chest looks completely different, and that is the point. The trade lives in your presets, not in the app.

Arming a preset

Press 1 through 9 to arm the first nine presets, or click one in the tool chest panel. The tool, style, and label all load at once, so everything you draw lands styled correctly and grouped correctly in the takeoff panel.

Tip

The preset’s label is what the takeoff panel groups by. Keep labels short, consistent, and decided once. Renaming a label mid-bid splits your totals.

If the panel takes more room than it earns, collapse it to a click-to-arm color rail with the « button. You keep one-click arming and get your screen back.

Saving a preset

Set up any tool the way you want it (tool, color, width, opacity, fill, dash, label) and save the current tool as a new preset. It appears in the chest and persists between sessions. Building a chest is usually a one-time job during your first real bid with the app, and it pays back on every bid after.

Syncing across machines

The tool chest exports and imports as a JSON file. To run the same standards on every machine:

1. Export the chest on the Mac where you built it.
2. Move the file however you like. A synced folder works fine.
3. Import it on the other Mac, or in the web app.

Imports merge by preset id, so importing the same file twice does not create duplicates, and re-importing an updated chest refreshes the presets it already knows. The same export/import is also how you share a starter chest with another estimator: a trade’s tool library is just a JSON file.

In the browser

The web app takes the same chest. Click Import presets in the toolbar, point it at your exported JSON, and arm presets from the toolbar dropdown. Styles and labels carry over, so takeoff groups stay consistent whether a run was drawn on the Mac or in the browser. Two differences to know:

• The browser is import-only. You build and save presets on the Mac and bring them over.
• Presets for tools the browser does not draw yet (arrows, callouts, freehand, stamps) stay in the library but out of the picker until the browser grows those tools.

Note that presets are per-machine app data, not part of any one plan set. The sidecar files next to your PDFs carry the markups themselves, so a sheet marked up with your presets looks right on a machine that has never seen your tool chest.