Variables

There are two types of variables in Trimble Quest, global variables and local variables.

Local variables are specific to a pricing sheet, or a cluster, and cannot be used outside of that pricing sheet or cluster, whereas a global variable can be used on multiple pricing sheets or clusters in the project.

Typically a variable is something that will affect more than one calculation and which is liable to change from project to project. So, modeling it as a variable allows you to be able to model the change caused in the calculations by changing the expression or the value of the variable in one place and then having that affect all of the dependent calculations.

As an example, say you pay general laborers an hourly wage, then the amount that you pay them per day will be determined by the length of the shift that they work. So, you could create a SHIFT variable with a value of 8, for an 8-hour shift, and use that in all your labor transform calculations. That way, if on a specific project the shift changes from 8 to 9 hours, you just need to update the value of SHIFT from 8 to 9, and Trimble Quest will update all of the transforms using the SHIFT variable.