CSV, PDF and Excel exports
Exports are immutable snapshots of project state at request time. A later correction never changes a file already downloaded: generate a new export and keep a filename or date that identifies the version.
Access and counting rule
Permission required: editor or project administrator to export. Viewers and reviewers can inspect the takeoff but do not have export permission. Disabled sheets are excluded from counts, runs, areas and tables. In a PDF that retains original sheets, a disabled sheet may remain present without annotations.
By default, production exports use only confirmed and manual detections. Include candidates is for review deliverables; it never puts those candidates into the BOM or estimate.
Choose the right format
| Path | Button | Contents |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard | Grouped CSV | One row per class, status and unit; quantity, sheets and evidence keys |
| Dashboard | Instances CSV | One row per detection; sheet, class, status, coordinates, confidence, group and note |
| Dashboard | Annotated PDF | Original plan with symbols, keys and status colours; counts only, never the routing |
| Dashboard | Cabling PDF | Cable and conduit runs, zones and device symbols on the plan, with a summary sheet |
| Dashboard | Excel (takeoff.xlsx) | Complete workbook: inventory, sheet matrix, runs, pipes, BOM, zones and estimate |
| Plan review | Export this sheet | Counts (CSV), Annotated plan (PDF), Cabling & piping (CSV) and (PDF) for the current sheet |
| Estimate | Estimate PDF | Rate, priced runs, BOM, additional lines, margin, taxes and total |
| Parts | CSV | Project-owned parts that can be re-imported into the catalog |
The Annotated PDF and the Cabling PDF are now produced in your browser: a 23-sheet plan with 2,744 marks went from about two minutes to roughly one second, and a 100-run plan from about 18 seconds to under a second. If your browser cannot do it, the application falls back to the server and tells you; a plan too large to annotate in one request says so clearly instead of timing out. The document itself is unchanged, to the pixel.
Export a reviewable takeoff
- Open the Dashboard or Review page.
- First finish sorting candidates in Review and quality.
- For a final deliverable, leave Include candidates clear. For internal review, select it and retain statuses in CSV or colours in PDF.
- Choose grouped CSV for consolidated quantities, per-instance CSV for traceability, or annotated PDF for graphical context.
- Open the download and verify project, language, sheets and item count before sharing it.
The annotated PDF can limit output to selected sheets when a page list is supplied. Included candidates are visually distinct. Ignored items never appear.
Cabling, estimate and Excel
Before a cabling export, check scale, multipliers, slack, cable spare and conduit spare. CSV is for tabular processing; PDF retains plan context. Areas appear in the PDF and the Excel workbook's Areas tab, but have no standalone CSV.
Before the estimate PDF, check missing prices, labour per foot, free lines and the tax snapshot. Excel contains the same calculations at creation time; editing cells in Excel does not write back to PlanRelevé.
Language, scale and integrity
Amounts, hours and percentages are written the way the document's language writes them — 1 234,56 $ in French, $1,234.56 in English — and dates follow Québec local time. A French CSV opens cleanly in a French Excel.
Runs and zones traced on a page with no scale are not priced: the CSV carries a NO SCALE SET marker, and the PDF and the estimate flag it too. Fix the scale before issuing a deliverable.
Clicking an export a second time while the first is still downloading no longer corrupts the first file: each request produces its own artifact.
Limits and recovery
If a file is empty, check active sheets and confirmed/manual statuses. If an option is wrong, do not rename the old file as though it changed: run a new export with the correct option. Concurrent requests create separate artifacts so one variant cannot mix another variant's bytes.