Punch! Professional Home Design Suite (30100) for PC

Pros: powerful, versatile
Cons: unfriendly, poor help and unhelpful tutorials

I grew up in a house my dad designed and built, including a phase or two of remodeling while I was old enough to help out. Sitting at Dad's knee and standing at his elbow was an education in a broad spectrum of building skills: plumbing, electrical work,...

Pros: lots of features
Cons: almost useless help guide; poor after sales support; utterly non-intuitive use

Having designed house plans since childhood, and being reasonably familiar with computers, I purchased Punch!Professional Home Design Suite with high expectations. I had hoped it would simplify some basic, tedious steps entailed in manually drawing plans by hand. Instead, I'm constantly frustrated by the non-intuitive nature of many of the functions. The program contains many sophisticated features and automates other functions that take a long time to do manually. But just try working, for example, with simple staircases, or reading the automatic wall measurements when using larger plan scales. The level of complication of the program would be a minor irritant, if it were not for the virtually useless help menu. As with so many computer programs, it has more specific features than many people would want, yet avoids ease of use of basic functions. In frustration I have let several computer whiz acquaintances load the program onto their computers in the hopes that they would learn how to use it, so they could teach me. They all deleted the program shortly after installation, citing its steep learning curve and the time required to assimilate enough knowledge just to do a simple design to completion.

Pros: Pros: I haven't found any.
Cons: Cons: Difficult to use; results in nearly useless finished product.

This software is awful! It's difficult to use and very counter-intuitive, and I am not a computer or design novice. Plus, when you're finished, all you have is a floor plan to present to an architect so he can draw you up some real plans. I have been using it for 2 days to design a simple garage, and so far have a basic square laid out and that's about it. I've spent the rest of the time learning to use the clunky interface, reading unhelpful tutorials, and starting over because I made a small mistake that couldn't be corrected without a lot more work than just starting over. Ugh. I bought the most expensive version they sell, too, what a mistake. Avoid this!

Pros: Basements, sloped lots, precision, flexibility, object editor. Very good!
Cons: Do wish it would print out a framing blue print.

Purchased 4.5.1 ignoring the negative review on Epinions for this product. Old review was 1 1/2 years old so it is possible the product has been improved. Superior to the 3D Home Architect 4 or 5 that I also own.

Product is not easy to use, but I have found no other product that can do any better job of 3d rendering than this one at an equivalent price. Certainly Autocad and other architectural tools would beat the product hands down but for the price, I am not sorry I bought this software.