Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Clear Estimates has gone carbon neutral!
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
We have decided to partner up with CarbonFund.org to offset the carbon emissions from running our business. Clear Estimates has been paper-less for nearly two years now, but we have decided to take things one step further by purchasing carbon offsets. Given that our business is based in the Midwest, most of our electricity is generated by coal power plants. Consequently, every kilowatt-hour consumed by our servers, computers, routers, and telephones results in nearly two pounds of Carbon Dioxide emitted into the environment. By purchasing carbon offsets we have funded the planting of enough forest to absorb an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere.
We believe in the CarbonFund motto “Reduce What You Can, Offset What You Can’t”, so we hope this action further demonstrates our commitment to social and environmental responsibility.
Read about this new partnership on the CarbonFund Blog!
Posted in General, Our software | No Comments »
Coming this week: Clear Estimates v2.5!
Sunday, September 7th, 2008
You asked for it and we delivered. Check out the new features in this video tour:
Posted in General, Our software, Technology | 2 Comments »
Have ideas for Clear Estimates v2.5? Now’s your time to share!
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
We need your help! With your feedback we were able to make v2.0 a huge success. Now it’s time to start thinking about the next release. Since we opened for business in 2004 we’ve released four versions of our software. Each release has come with new useful features suggested by YOU, our users. It wasn’t long ago that you couldn’t print out a table summary of your project, duplicate a project, or integrate with QuickBooks Pro. Those were all features requested by our users. You mentioned it would be convenient to use information from a respected nationally maintained database, so we linked to RemodelMAX.
Would you like the ability to search for parts? A wider part view in the Project Manager? Part of what our company so unique is that we are a relatively small organization. This means that we are very adaptable and give a lot of weight to the opinion of each of our customers; we invite you to play a role in our product development. Please post a comment below with suggestions for our next release and help us build a better product!
Posted in General, Our software | 12 Comments »
Google spreadsheets useful for estimating? Video demonstration.
Friday, December 14th, 2007
Click here to watch video demonstration! 
Google has built a web application that will allow you to create, save, edit, and share spreadsheets within your web browser. This is much more than a convenient development; what this suggests is that Google acknowledges the increasing demand to shift technology from our computers’ hard drives to web hosts and that they would like to be the forerunner in providing us with this rapidly expanding technology.
In software engineering, a web application is an application delivered to users from a web server over a network such as the World Wide Web or an intranet. Web applications are popular due to the ubiquity of the web browser as a client, sometimes called a thin client. The ability to update and maintain web applications without distributing and installing software on potentially thousands of client computers is a key reason for their popularity. … for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebApp
But without reflecting on what this means with regards to software trends, let’s look at what Google Spreadsheets mean to your business. Here are the pros and cons of developing your spreadsheets online:
Pros:
- You don’t need software! This is a free “Web App”, so the program is run from a web server, not your computer.
- The files can be accessed from any computer. All you need is a web browser with access to the Internet. That means you could start creating a bid on your Google spreadsheet at your office, continue working on it from your home computer, then edit it if necessary on site with your client.
- You can choose who can access and who can edit the spreadsheet. Multiple people can even work on the spreadsheet simultaneously from remote locations!
- You can start your spreadsheet from scratch or upload data from a XLS (Excel) or CSV (Comma Separated Value) file.
Cons:
- The processing speed of entering data into the spreadsheet is limited to the speed of your Internet connection. Your CPU can still take your high-speed modem in head-to-head competition, but this will likely be less of a factor in the future. If you’re still using a modem, Google spreadsheets may get frustrating.
- Although you can implement an impressive collection of formulae, the application isn’t as diverse and powerful as software like Excel, so there are some limitations, particularly if you’re an advanced user.
- You’re required to create a gmail account (free).
-Nolan Orfield
Posted in General, Technology | 3 Comments »
Database or spreadsheet. What’s the difference, anyway?
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
To address this question it’s easiest to look at estimating from a historical perspective: Once upon a time, every contractor created estimates by hand. He/she would pull out a pad of paper and pencil, jot down some figures line by line, then sum up each item to achieve the estimate. This was a simple and effective way to create a bid, but human error, inflexibility, and time consumption left plenty of room for improvement.
With the advent of computers, anybody with an ounce of technical savvy immediately recognized the benefit of using spreadsheets; it’s faster, making changes is easy, and computers are great at math! Evidently the term “spreadsheet” at one point (before my time) referred to a physical sheet of paper in which data was laid out in a grid format. These days when someone refers to a “spreadsheet” they are most likely referring a type of file created in programs like Microsoft Excel. Data is still laid out in rows and columns as in the paper variety, but the capability to integrate formulae and build relationships between the “cells” (the box where a row and column meet) make electronic spreadsheets much more powerful and MUCH more useful. While this is a big step up from doing things by hand, spreadsheets still have their limitations: Making changes that will apply to an entire document can be tricky, tracking change-orders can be challenging, and the flexibility that only spreadsheets can offer also means a lot can go wrong in the hands of someone inexperienced with the technology. Additionally, those with good attention to detail will add so many line items that the spreadsheet quickly becomes aggravatingly long and cumbersome. For these reasons, it is oftentimes best to work with the next technological “step up,” a database.
It sounds intimidating, I know. If spreadsheets can be difficult to use, how in the world are you supposed to learn how to build a database? A number of contractors have successfully developed customized Microsoft Access database-based applications but, unless you have a Ph. D. in computer science, taking this route probably isn’t worthwhile. Good news: A number of companies (such as Clear Estimates, Inc, of course) have already taken care of this for you! Database-based programs are more powerful than spreadsheets because they utilize one centralized location (the “database”) that contains multiple tables full of data that are all linked and interdependent. As complicated as this sounds, a well-designed database-based system is very easy to use; these programs ideally utilize nice looking “graphical user interfaces” (pretty screens) that present the data in convenient and easy-to-understand formats, as opposed to spreadsheets that put you face-to-face with the raw data. Not only are these programs easier to use and more powerful, but they also have the potential to incorporate additional features like integration with QuickBooks, generation of various reports, scheduling, and other things that are difficult or impossible using a spreadsheet.
So which method is the best? It depends on your style and your company. The trend has been to adopt more sophisticated database-based methods, but what it ultimately comes down to is finding a system that is robust, flexible, and can be set up to mimic your estimating style. These days there’s no excuse for doing things by hand. A plethora of options exist in estimating software, database and spreadsheet-based alike, so there’s no reason you can’t set up a system to work well for your company.
-Nolan Orfield
Posted in General, Our software, Technology | 1 Comment »
Welcome to Clear Estimates, Inc’s Construction Estimating Blog!
Monday, October 8th, 2007
Welcome to our new blog about Construction Estimating. My name is Nolan Orfield and I am one of the co-founders of Clear Estimates, Inc. We believe that it is essential to “keep a pulse” on the opinions of our customers; in fact nearly all revisions made to the program in its last three releases were driven by feedback from Clear Estimates users. I hope this will become a place to share ideas, talk about technology trends in the construction industry, and discuss ways to improve our software. So don’t be shy! Please let us know how you feel and post comments.
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