Duplication Detector?

When a child item is duplicated under the same parent, it would be useful if ZZTakeoff could highlight it in a different colour or show a visual flag. This would help estimators quickly identify duplicates and avoid potential double counting during takeoff.

Thank you for this feature request, I have shared it with the dev team. Feel free to describe the workflow you have in mind to help us make the best version of this feature.

Perhaps some type of active monitoring involving a linear object being drawn or pasted on top of the same coordinates as a prior linear object with a warning message or something?

Or maybe just some tool the user activates that does a "takeoff sweep" and points out potential user errors it spotted, kind of like how Excel warns you of an inconsistency it found in cells with adjacent formulas that you have to ignore?

Here is a detailed solution for consideration. Recognize the individual elements within a compound symbol and use them to prevent duplicate counting.

Example:

A drawing may contain:

• TS = Tamper Switch
• WF = Waterflow Switch
• WF/TS = a combined Waterflow + Tamper assembly

Today, if I Auto Count the combined WF/TS symbol and later Auto Count standalone TS symbols, the TS portion inside the combined symbol will also be picked up—creating a duplicate.

Ideally, Auto Count would understand:

WF/TS = WF element + TS element

Then, when searching for standalone TS, it would recognize that a matching TS already exists as an element within a previously counted compound symbol and exclude it.

The key concept is leveraging the individual vector/image elements that make up each symbol, not just treating the symbol as one flat image.

For example, a combined WF/TS symbol may be made up of roughly 10 individual elements, while the standalone TS may consist of only 5 of those elements. A smarter recognition engine could use that relationship to understand that the TS is a subset of the larger WF/TS symbol.

A useful workflow would be:

• User first creates a TS count based on the 5 elements that define the standalone TS.
• Auto Count finds all matching TS instances, including TS elements that may be part of larger compound symbols.
• User then creates a WF/TS count using the full compound symbol, which contains additional elements.
• When the stronger/larger match is identified, zzTakeoff recognizes that the previously counted TS belongs inside the WF/TS symbol and reassigns that count from TS to WF/TS rather than leaving both counts in place.

This would effectively create a hierarchy of symbol matches where the more complete element match takes priority over a partial/subset match.

There may be additional logic required but the important concept is:

Use symbol recognition + element-level comparison + match priority/reassignment to prevent duplicate counts between standalone and compound symbols.

That would significantly improve Auto Count accuracy for trades where symbols frequently share common sub-elements

I forgot about this request. I use Claude now to do a run through my finished takeoffs and it finds area/linear duplications quite well. It found a couple for me today in fact.

Hi Jes, do you mind sharing the prompt that you use?

All I wrote was:

I want you to review my (project name) takeoff in zztakeoff and see if there's anything I missed or over-estimated.

Start using claude and connect it, use cowork with access to the folder with your drawings/specs, mcp to zz and get it to audit your takeoffs and assemblies