The Summary Tab shows you each Takeoff Item used in the current bid, and every active Takeoff Item Result. Active Results are those chosen to be visible in the Takeoff Items Pane in Takeoff Item Properties - see Related Articles for details about selecting which Results you want to see.
In the next few articles, we are going to show you how to filter and group the Summary Tab in different ways so that you can analyze your bid.
There are no hard rules about how to use the Summary Tab - it is really a big pivot table of sorts that provides an amazing amount of flexibility.
The goal of the Summary Tab is give you a way to break down, filter, and group your takeoff in ways that make sense to you, and to avoid forcing you to copy information into another application (like Excel or Sheets) to analyze and manipulate it.
Things to consider before you start grouping and filtering:
- If you used Bid Areas, the Summary Tab can show you how much of each Takeoff Item is used in each Bid Area.
- If you used Typical Groups and Typical Areas, you can see how much takeoff is in a single instance of each "Typical" and overall results, of course broken out by Bid Area, however you want to see the Results.
- If you are used to Excel, you can export the Summary Tab to Excel, although, you lose the ability to group and filter the Results by Bid Area, of course.
- We recommend not going overboard on grouping. Group only as much as necessary because you can apply so much grouping to the Summary Tab that what shows on the screen becomes so granular, its usefulness is diminished.
Filtering, Grouping, and Resetting
You can use Filtering, Column Grouping, and Row Grouping together. Experiment with the results but understand you can filter and group your data so much that it becomes unusable.
If you get to a point where you cannot make sense of the Summary Tab, just click the 
button at the top of the screen to reset the grid to defaults and start filtering/grouping again.
The next article details Filtering the Summary Tab.
Showing and Hiding Columns