Estimating

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Welcome to Methvin’s Student Portal.

Education is a journey, never be done travelling!

Build your professional skills in project management and professional pricing practice.

We invite you to use Methvin’s estimating, and other applications in your studies, it’s free of charge and we know will make some of your projects and pricing assignments a little bit easier.

Methvin registration will offer you access to a range of professional tools that will enable you both as a student and a registered professional.

You will also find a couple of pointers to

- - Writing a research assignments
  - Open source Academic Journals you might find useful.

Connect and collaborate for group assignments

Agile project management

Register and we will unlock and set you up with a shared account valid for your undergrad and postgrad study period. Just drop us an email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. once you are registered. Have your team emails ready to load and share.

You can also head to the contact page and book a demo if you want live help. Don’t forget to also connect to us on Linkedin and join the conversation. We love to hear how our customers experience our platform and if you have any great ideas that will make the tools better, drop us an email.

Methvin Agile software offers you a mainstream project management tool to manage not only complex group work, but any of your larger more complex assignments or projects.

Agile ensures that you stay connected while you collaborate and will help you stay accountable to the group.

Follow these simple steps to set your team up

1. If you don’t have a Methvin log on, register on the home page.
2. Once you have a log on, head to the “Create a new project”. The button is on the top right hand side of your screen
3. Once in this, you will see a “+” on the left to create a “child project”.
4. Give you child project a name
5. You will note a screen pop up with a default position. When you add team members, all of them will see the “child projects”. If at some later stage you want to specifically allocate tasks to a specific team member privately you will need to change this default.
6. Add team member by clicking on the “share'' button (top right). Type in the email address of the team member and hit enter. Repeat till all members are listed
7. Using the “check child project “ you can now start creating your workflow
8. (+) Add columns. When you add a column you can label it. Traditionally these might be labelled like this
  1. Task
  2. In Progress
  3. For review
  4. Completed
9. You and the group can call them anything that makes more sense to your team.
10. Within the first column,task, using the (+) button add tasks to your project. Once you have a task loaded you can add sub notes to each task. It is at this point you will allocate a responsible person or persons and a due date.
11. While in this task window you will note that you can assign this task to your other columns, a,b,c,d, etc by using the drop down.
12. As you allocate to b, c or d the task will move to that column.
13. On the main project page you can also use the drag and drop function to reallocate tasks or move columns around.

A great feature here is the ability to add files to the team project. Everything sits in one space, open and shared. Good luck with that project!

Taking the “guesstimation” out of estimation

Knowing how to price using an estimation tool will position you professionally ahead of your colleagues. It demonstrates fiscal responsibility to the project profit outcomes.

Estimating application

Get started with these easy steps and review an estimating demo here if you need to.

1. Register for an account to log on if you haven’t already done so.
2. Create a New Project.
3. Add the scope/SoP.
4. Each item has its own attached worksheet.
5. Include hours by resource for increased accuracy.
6. Think about risk costs.
7. Review and adjust the estimate as needed.

Need some help with information for estimating assignments?

We cannot write that assignment but maybe we can help with some other useful information.

Production rates

These will help you price works using construction norms, which in turn increases your accuracy.

Takeoff application

This will give you fast accurate takeoff for any dwg, dxf and pdf file, just set the scale and start measuring.

To start your first takeoff:

1. Click on “New project” top right hand of home screen
2. Select “new takeoff project”.
3. Give the project a name and save.
4. This will open the application and you should then drag and drop your drawing in file formats, pdf, dwg, dxf and svg onto the takeoff window.

Top tips

1. Setting the scale.

Once the drawing has opened, a calibration screen will open. Set the scale by using the offered (+) pointer to start and finish a measured line. Then, tell the application what that measure distance is; ensuring that you select both the system ( metric or imperial) and the appropriate units.

2 . Measuring options

There are icons at the top of the take off tool. Follow this link for a takeoff demo view.

The icons can be described as below

1. Selecter: This is used to move the page around. Click and hold and drop
2. End area calculation for earthworks volumes. Click on this to select end area type ( cut or fill)
3. Wall details. This is used to measure walls or fences. You will need to input the height and units.
4. Length of object
5. Any area
6. Count . Used to count any item like lamp posts

As you measure items it will create layers into the measurement report on the left hand side icon bar to lower right hand side of the tool. Return to the takeoff demo to review these functions.

The icons can be described as below

1. Open document: this allows you to switch between uploaded drawing files
2. Select additional files to upload
3. Zoom functions. This can be done with the mouse as well
4. Export file to PDF
5. Export raw data to excel
6. Pivot table to manipulate data to preferred layout
  1. Export to excel
  2. Export takeoff to pricing module

Writing a Research assignment?

The best advice we can give you to make your life easy is to become a super guru user of EndoNote, Word, Excel and referencing styles. Outside of presenting credible data this is where GPA’s can go up and down at University by half a grade at post grad levels.

EndNote.

Most Universities will be able to get this software to you FOC. Take it and take all the free lessons they offer in your library. EndNote will literally save your writing life. You can create a cloud library, use search engines, and create abstracts to search and a whole bunch more.

If the Institution doesn’t offer it to you, get it here on free trial for 30 days.

http://endnote.com/downloads

Use this online training

https://www.youtube.com/user/EndNoteTraining

Know your referencing style requirement

For example: Does you Academic institution require APA referencing, Harvard, author date etc? Getting this right will save you a whole ½ grade point at a Masters level.

A useful tip: Make sure that the reference imports with the grammar correct. It is often not loaded in Journals that way, especially the older ones.

Word and excel.

At the beginning of your course you will have been told by your academic institution what formatting is required for assignment submissions. If you don’t know, ask. Set this up on your computer in word as a default setting.

https://www.howtogeek.com/school/microsoft-word-document-formatting-essentials/lesson5/

Need to Cross Reference a table, figure, and page, learn how to automate it in word. You will save hours of editing time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LWwcl01uUE

Need to build a formula, create a pivot chart etc

https://www.howtogeek.com/school/microsoft-excel-formulas-and-functions/lesson2/