Spreadsheets, designed for takeoff.
Aggregate costs, quantities, and changes across thousands of drawings and millions of markups — against moving prices, filtered by version and scope. A spreadsheet, turbocharged for estimating.
Your Excel formulas still work as-is — and Power Syntax exports back to native Excel on the way out.
One name, every sheet. Stop tracking whether cost is column C, D, or E — a template uses [cost] wherever it lands.
No ranges to maintain. [:column] is the whole column, bound to the data, so totals stay right as rows grow — no B2:B100 to widen, no SUMPRODUCT to decode.
A rate table you call. Promote any sheet and look it up by key, like a function — rates or assemblies addressed by name, not a VLOOKUP range that breaks on a reorder.
True cross-sheet totals. .building=3 reaches across every drawing tagged building 3 for a live total; .project spans them all. Excel has no cross-sheet SUMIF — so there's no rollup sheet to rebuild.
One line prices the job. Scope, named column, and lookup in a single formula. Change a rate once and every floor re-prices; re-tag a drawing and it drops in or out of the total.
Price B60 at the B20 rate? A classic way to go bankrupt — or get fired. VLOOKUP just takes the first “Concrete” it finds. Power Syntax calls a duplicate lookup an error, not a guess.