If you are planning an addition to your house, I am assuming you are a bit technical. If so, you should have no problem with the endless amount of options.

All the reviews I could find online are negative about this product, except one pointed out that, if you are a beginner, you may be overwhelmed by all the options you have. But if you have any experience with blueprints, or graphics in general, you will have absolutley no problem with this at all.

As soon as you start all you have to do is drag the mouse to create walls, you keep doing that until all the walls are defined. As you drag the length of the wall if shown, and once you are done you can manually input the legth of the wall to the inch. The thickness of the wall can be modified as well. You click the "window" icon and add windows with ease. You click the "door" button and you add doors with ease. You can choose different types of doors and windows. See, that wasen't so bad, was it? Now you click walk or fly thru and you can get a feel for your space in 3D. Works very well, though tricky at first, untill you get used to the controls. (Tricky for like 40 seconds):)

OK, it has a cool feature that lets you add outlets and switches and lights, including highhats. There is an ELECTRICAL tab which you do this in. Now as you do this it gives it to you in symbol form, so when you print it out you get the full electrical blueprints. Now once you go into 3D mode, you actually see a switch or an outlet at the correct heights and locations. very cool....

So you see I don't konw what all there poeople onlne are talking about. This produst is fine, and I work with blueprints, and have been in graphics design for many years.... I suppose, if you have never touched something like this you would have a problem, but then do you really want to be designing your own home additions if you can't even figure this out? lol

It will get tricky adding floors ontop of each other and creating stairs between them is tricky too....

Oh, there is another option which I did not buy but heard alot of good things about. Better Homes and Gardens has a Home Desgin software that is supposed to be REALLY easy to use but lacks all the advanced features this software has. It got the highest reviews I found, but I didn't want it cause I don't like to be limited.

PS. There is two different boxes for this software, the one I bought looks different than the one on this site, but if you look at the bar code it should end with 94100. Thats how you know it's the same software. Punch does an awful job, with it's packaging graphics, they all look the same but can be completely different suites.



Recommended: Yes