The categories tools in Stratosphere give you the ability to organize your takeoffs, duplicate layers in bulk, and streamline your takeoff process. The tools are all designed to be simple, but we'll walk through them here and you can find a full video walkthrough below in the release video.



  1. To create a new category, click on the "+ Add" button in the "Categories" section of your left-hand toolbar, making sure that you have selected the "Layers" tab at the top of this toolbar
  2. To add layers to a category, click and drag layers from the "All layers" section down into the desired category. Note that any newly created layers, whether they were created in the browser or from Excel, appear in the "All layers" section as a sort of triage area and must then be dragged into the desired category
  3. You can also move layers from one category to another by simply clicking and dragging. This also applies to moving layers back to the triage area if you're unsure of how you want to categorize them.
  4. While you're working on one specific area of your takeoff and want to see only the layers for that category, you can collapse the categories that you aren't working with to streamline your layer list. Just hover over the category that you want to minimize and then click the two up-arrows that appear. To expand that category back open, click the two down-arrows that appear in the same place. 
  5. To duplicate a category, hover over the category that you want to duplicate and click the icon with the two pages stacked on top of each other. Note that duplicating a category duplicates all layers in that category but does not carry over the takeoffs associated with those layers. This can be a powerful tool if you have duplicated items across multiple floors or buildings and don't want to re-type all of the layer names.
  6. To delete a category, hover over the category that you want to delete and click the trash can icon. Stratosphere will confirm that you want to delete the category with a warning popup. Once you delete a category, the layers in that category are not deleted but return to the triage area.