MasterBill - January 2009 -

General News

Masterbill Elite

QSCad

Masterbill

w: www.masterbill.com

e: sales@masterbill.com

t: +44 (0)1727 855563

Masterbill News Archive

New Year, New Look Newsletter!

Happy New Year and welcome to our new look Newsletter bringing you all the latest news of the developments at Masterbill - we hope you like it!

Well here we are in 2009 and it seems that the recession is still dominating our News with reports of doom and gloom taking up huge amounts of column inches and TV time and it seems everyone is considering how they should respond to the news both personally and in their work.

In the last few weeks I have come across a couple of responses that interested me and I thought I would share them with you. The first comes from Sam Walton a US Retailer who said

"I was asked what I thought about the recession. I thought about it and decided I did not want to take part"

The second comes from a recent survey carried out by a Construction Industry Software vendor who reported that

"59% of those surveyed reported that their principal strategies to combat the current challenging market conditions will be the reduction of costs and improved efficiency through IT."

Whatever your strategy this is a good time to be looking at how you can work as efficiently as possible and with the latest Masterbill software consistently saving it's users both time and money we would be pleased to help you with this.

Paul Watkins - Sales & Marketing Director

P.S. If you think there are others who would benefit from receiving regular Newsletters from Masterbill please subscribe them here.

eTendering - What's stopping you?

It seems that we are not the only ones who are to find out why eTendering is rarely used with Building Magazine reporting "Industry snubs RICS' electronic tendering service" and announcing that the RICS has launched an investigation into why their service has only been used on 50 projects out of a possible 25,000.

eTendering is often talked about but rarely done - with your help we would like to find out why. Please help us by completing our questionnaire.

What's New? - Making use of your Library in a Freeform Bill

Until now Standard Library items could only be used in a Traditional Sorted Bill - that's about to change.

Freeform (or Flat) Bills are a great way to create items without the need to enter them in the Library of Descriptions and are especially useful when describing bespoke works such as Demolition Spot Items. Disassociating our Bill from our Standard Library of Descriptions is all well and good but what happens if you wish to include both bespoke and standard items in the same freeform bill or wish to select standard items to create a composite item in a Cost Plan or Budget Estimate? More...

Expert's Corner - Remote Working Options

Advances in technology now make it easier than ever before for users to work on their Masterbill software from a remote location making it possible to work from another office, home, site or even the train, by using one of several options.

As always, it is wise to consider the different options in order to decide which one best suits your requirements and budget, so we thought it might be helpful if we explained the options for you and what we consider to be the best pros and cons. More...

Why Upgrade? - Reason 21 - Page Layouts

Whilst Masterbill³ users enjoy some flexibility when it comes to the layout of their printed documents the Page Layout facilities of Masterbill Elite make this look extremely basic and somewhat limited.

Masterbill Elite users are able to edit all the settings included in Masterbill³ and many more including: More...

Coming soon... Text Measurement

Wouldn’t it be good if you could simply click on a Text reference in your drawing, identify every occurrence of that reference and measure all or some of the identified items in just a few clicks?

Well work has already started on the next release of QSCad which should be winging its way to all those users with current software maintenance in the next month or so and this feature is already included. More...

Expert's Corner - Arc Measurement

Are you making use of this powerful and easy to use feature?

Clicking along a curve could be a thing of the past once you get to grips with the arc measurement feature but it seems a number of users are struggling to get started so we thought we would provide more detail and even produce a video! More...

Why Upgrade? - Reason 21 - AutoCAD 2009 Compatibility

Make sure you don't get left behind as others upgrade their CAD software

With more and more designers using AutoCAD 2009 as their CAD system in order to take advantage of the latest features it’s important to ensure that our measurement software remains compatible.

An Index

Over the last two years we have produced 19 Tips and Tricks - just in case you missed one we have produced an Index. More...