Extracting Commencement and Final elevation for Consultant's Manual checking

Hi all,
My name is Solomon Moffat and I’m a Quantity Surveyor working on civil road projects in the Caribbean. I’m really enjoying using Kubla so far, but I’ve hit a workflow issue and would appreciate some guidance.
The Consultant wants to verify the earthworks quantities using the “old school” method: levels (or heights) at the LHS, Centre Line, and RHS every 5 m along the road corridor.
In Kubla I can see the existing and proposed levels at any point by hovering the mouse, but capturing these one-by-one is very tedious and time-consuming.
Is there a better way to extract this information – for example, generating a report or exporting section data at 5 m intervals – so that I can tabulate it for his checks and certification of quantities for payment?
Any tips, workflows, or documentation links would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Solomon

Hi all,
My name is Solomon Moffat and I’m a Quantity Surveyor working on civil road projects in the Caribbean. I’m really enjoying using Kubla so far, but I’ve hit a workflow issue and would appreciate some guidance.
The Consultant wants to verify the earthworks quantities using the “old school” method: levels (or heights) at the LHS, Centre Line, and RHS every 5 m along the road corridor.
In Kubla I can see the existing and proposed levels at any point by hovering the mouse, but capturing these one-by-one is very tedious and time-consuming.
Is there a better way to extract this information – for example, generating a report or exporting section data at 5 m intervals – so that I can tabulate it for his checks and certification of quantities for payment?
Any tips, workflows, or documentation links would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Solomon

Hi Solomon,

Welcome to the Kubla Cubed community and good to hear Kubla Cubed has reached the Caribbean!   I know we have some users in Cayman not sure about Jamaica or elsewhere in the Caribbean you are in a small circle for sure.. 

The situation you’re describing is something we do want to support more directly in future versions. Ultimately the goal is to give users a way to “check” the calculations by generating clear, human-readable outputs — in your case, end-area style calculations, and eventually grid-based breakdowns too.

That said, we can still help you get much better results than manually extracting point-by-point levels.

The key tool for this is the Cross Section feature.

Kubla Cubed | Creating Cross Sections

Cross sections can take multiple lines, so tracing the left-hand and right-hand edges is straightforward — either by manually sketching them or importing lines from CAD. The difficulty is the sections at 5 m chainage intervals. We do want to add a dedicated tool for this, but it isn’t available yet.

For now, the best workaround, if you don't have them already in CAD, is to use the length measurement to mark out the 5 m spacing, then create each section manually by eye. Not perfect, but workable.

If you’re comfortable using AI tools, you can take it a step further. For example, you can provide your list of centreline points and ask for the point at a fixed distance along it, then ask for perpendicular/tangent lines at those points. It’s not quite CAD-level accuracy, but it’s better than guessing by eye.

I’ve already spoken to the development team about this, and we’ll try to prioritise the proper tool for inclusion in the next major release.

Once you’ve created your sections, the next step is to export the cross-section points to Excel using:
File → Create Spreadsheet → Cross Sections

From there, I always recommend creating a scatter line chart (an XY Scatter, not a Line chart — Line charts won’t work for this type of data). However, I did notice a small issue with our exports: in Kubla Cubed 2021 the Excel charts worked perfectly, but in Kubla Cubed 2024 some exported numbers appear visually correct yet are internally stored as text. They work fine in formulas, but Excel won’t plot them correctly in an XY Scatter chart.

To fix this, select each column one at a time and go to:
Data → Text to Columns → Finish

   

This forces Excel to reinterpret the values as true numbers. Nothing will look different, but charts will then work correctly.

The final step is to drop those cleaned values into our end-area-method spreadsheet.

https://www.kublasoftware.com/calculatin...on-method/

Once you’ve generated the sections, just input them into the spreadsheet and it should give you exactly what you need.


If you get stuck — or if it works well — feel free to post back with an update. Over time we’ll keep improving this workflow, and I’ll update this thread when new tools become available (including the automatic section-generation tool, which should be fairly straightforward to add). A few users have also asked for our spreadsheets to include “above/below area” reporting, which would definitely help with this type of analysis.


The section-export → spreadsheet workflow hasn’t had much attention for a while, so it would be great to enhance it — I suspect many users don’t even realise the feature exists.

Good luck and will be interesting to hear how you get on.