Before you dive into Sparkel, there are three concepts worth understanding clearly. Once these click, everything else in the tool makes sense immediately.

If you've used tools like Solibri or a BIM viewer before, you're used to the tool reading the model and giving you a list of what it finds. You get a flat list of elements — walls, columns, slabs — based on whatever the model contains.

Sparkel works the other way around. You define the rows in the table first, and then you connect model elements or shapes to those rows. This means your quantity table reflects your commercial structure — your way of organising a bid or order — not the model's structure.

This distinction is important because most BIM models can't be fully trusted. Elements are missing, properties are wrong, geometry is approximate. By letting you define the rows yourself, Sparkel puts you in control regardless of model quality.

An item is a row in your quantity table. Each item has a name, a unit of measurement, and a quantity. You create items to represent what you actually want to measure — for example, "External concrete walls C30", "Steel columns HEB 200", or "Facade panels — west elevation".

Items are grouped inside a takeoff, which is the main working document in a Sparkel project. A project can contain multiple takeoffs — for example, one per trade or one per building section. See The Quantity Table for a full guide to working with items.

Linking is the act of connecting BIM elements to an item. You select elements in the 3D viewer, select the item you want to measure them against, and click Link. The item's quantity updates immediately based on the geometry of the linked elements.

You can link as many elements as you want to a single item, and you can use dynamic linking to automatically link elements based on their BIM properties — for example, linking all elements where IfcWall.IsExternal = True. This saves significant time on large models and keeps quantities updated if the model changes.

→ See BIM Linking for the full guide, including how to set up dynamic linking rules and inspect BIM properties.

Shapes are the alternative to linking when BIM geometry isn't reliable — or when you're working from a PDF drawing. A shape is a geometry you draw yourself, directly on top of a drawing or in 3D space, that represents a quantity.

When you draw a shape, it appears immediately as an item in the quantity table with its area, length, or volume calculated automatically. Shapes give you precise control over what gets measured, independent of how the model is built.

Shapes work identically in 2D (on PDFs) and 3D (in the BIM viewer), which means you can combine both in the same project and get a consistent table output.

→ See Shapes for the full guide, including shape types and how to draw them.

A typical Sparkel workflow uses a mix of all three:

The result is a quantity table you've built and verified yourself, backed by visual evidence in the viewer for every single row.