Quickstart

The five things to remember

Everything in Struction comes back to these five ideas. Remember just this much and you'll be fine.

1. Your documents are here. Every drawing, spec and bid document you upload is the source information for the maps.
2. Your scopes come from your drawings and specs. Struction reads your documents and writes a first-draft scope of work for each trade.
3. Every output has a source. Any item, quantity or risk can be traced back to the exact page it came from.
4. And every source is connected. Scopes, drawings, specs and issues are linked by their relationships, so you can always see what affects what.
5. Chat is your partner. Anything you can do by clicking, you can also ask chat to do.

Your first session

1. Sign up with a work email.
2. Create a project. Name it, add the bid date, and upload your drawings, specs, bid documents and schedules. If you have a base set and addenda, stack them as separate issuances — see Upload. Struction labels each file; fix a label from the dropdown if it guessed wrong.
3. Let it process. Struction reads the documents, organizes them by discipline, and writes a first-draft scope of work for each trade.
4. Land on the map. Your home base: the whole project organized by discipline, with each discipline's scopes of work below it. Zoom out to see every discipline and its scopes; zoom in to see individual sheets, scopes, and the chips that mark risks and RFIs. See Maps.
5. Open a scope of work. Click a scope card to open it in the detail panel and read its items. Check the sources on a few items — every item points back to the drawing or spec page it came from — and mark the ones you've checked as verified.
6. Ask chat a question. Press Cmd+J and try something specific: What are the biggest risks in the Mechanical scope? Every answer cites its sources. See Prompting.
7. Look at an issue. Click a risk or RFI chip on the map to understand it and decide what to do. See Why issues matter.
8. Measure something. Open a sheet in Focus View and take off an area or a count; the quantity is linked to the sheet it came from. See Takeoff basics.
9. Export when ready. When your scopes look right, export them to Excel to send to subcontractors or attach to your ITBs. See Exporting.

Getting around

• Zoom and pan the map like a web map: scroll to zoom, drag to pan.
• Single-click an item to select it and light up everything it connects to.
• Double-click a sheet to open it full screen in Focus View; press Esc or Exit focus to come back. Scope cards open in the detail panel instead.
• Right-click an item for its menu. On a sheet: Ask chat · Add comment · Add assignment · Open focus view · Open detail panel · Move to · Edit title. On a scope card: Ask chat · Add comment · Add assignment · Open detail panel · Merge into… · Delete scope. Right-clicking empty canvas offers Comment here.
• Switch to the 3D model with the Map / 3D toggle at the top center.
• Open chat any time with Cmd+J.