Opening large plan sets without drowning in them

When you open a PDF of 25 pages or more through the desktop app’s Open PDF button (File → Open), Groundwork Takeoff pauses before loading it and shows the page picker: a thumbnail grid of every sheet, each labeled with its page number and detected sheet size (ARCH D · 24×36 in and the other common ARCH/ANSI/ISO sheets — it reads the paper, not the file name).

Two ways forward

• Open all. The default, and one keystroke — press Enter and the whole set opens exactly as it always did. The picker never slows down the common case.
• Open a selection. Tick just the sheets you bid — the six architectural floor plans out of a 300-page set — and choose where to save them. The selection becomes its own PDF and opens immediately.

Use the All / None buttons to select in bulk, then untick the exceptions. Previews render in the background for the first 200 pages; every page stays selectable regardless.

A selection is its own document

This matters: the extracted sheets are a new, independent document — their own file (saved where you chose), their own takeoffs, their own collaboration session. That keeps a 12-sheet working set fast on jobsite hardware, and it keeps your takeoff tree focused on the sheets that carry quantities.

If you later need a sheet you didn't pull, open the original set again and extract another selection — or just open the whole thing. Nothing about the original is modified, ever.

Tips

• Sheet-size labels are a fast sanity check that a set was plotted consistently — a stray Letter-size page in an ARCH D set is usually a scanned addendum.
• Sets under 25 pages skip the picker entirely and open directly.
• The picker is part of the desktop app's open flow; the web app opens files directly.