Learn to Draw Floor Plans with SmartDraw

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• published: 22 Mar 2014
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Learn how to make a floor plan using the world's easiest drawing tool. You start with the exact office or home floor plan template you need, then add the walls, windows, and doors. Next, you simply stamp furniture, appliances, and fixtures from our large collection of floor plan libraries, and drag and drop them to get the correct placement. http://www.smartdraw.com/software/floorplan-software.htm?id=333169 Mapping out a floor plan may seem like a complicated process, requiring specialized software specific to this need however, creating floor plans is yet another task that you can accomplish quickly and easily with SmartDraw. There are dozens of floor plan examples and templates to give you an instant head start. Easily add and edit walls, doors and windows. SmartDraw helps you align, arrange and measure all the elements of your floor plan perfectly. Choose from hundreds of ready-made visuals to customize your space: furniture, kitchen, bathroom and lighting fixtures, cabinets, wiring, plumbing, landscape elements, and so much more! To get started, click on the floor plans icon from the list of popular templates. There is a huge assortment of room outlines and examples to choose from categorized by commercial options, like office layouts and warehouse plans and by residential options, like kitchen and living room layouts. Just choose the one that fits your needs and build from there. We'll choose Custom Floor Plan to start from scratch. All of the tools you need to create the floor plan are here in the SmartPanel. Select the Add Wall tool and click once in your work area to begin the wall and once more to complete it. Continue adding more walls to create a closed room. This circle will appear at the end of a wall to help you connect it accurately. An anchor will appear if you're connecting adjacently to another wall. Hit the Stop Adding Walls button to turn off the wall tool. The dimensions of your objects are shown by default. You can hide these by clicking off that option. You can also drag here to adjust where these measurements appear. Measurements are for the interior of a room or building by default. To change this, select the room and click on the Design tab up here in the Ribbon. If you click on Dimensions, you'll find an option to switch to an exterior measurement of your walls. A very handy option. To adjust your dimensions, click on the dimension value and type in your desired measurement. You can even adjust by fractions of an inch for greater precision. Or you can just drag a wall to make a room bigger or smaller and adjacent walls stay lined up perfectly. Many rooms are not simple rectangles but have corners and nooks. To add something like this, click on Add Corner and then click where you want it to go and a corner pops into place. Add another corner here, pull the space to your desired size and you now have an alcove. You can just as easily add a wall opening by selecting Add Wall Opening and clicking where you want it to go and adjusting it to the size that you want. If you right click on a wall you'll find many options for altering it, like changing the shape of the wall. Add doors and windows by simply dragging them to where they need to go and they link neatly to the walls. From a vast array of libraries, you can easily add furnishings, appliances and hundreds of other symbols. Just drag and drop them to where you want them in the room. Modifying these objects is simple too. Select the object and use the control handles to adjust it. Resize, rotate or move it around as you need to... or type in the dimensions that you want. If you move the room around, everything within it stays in place. If you add a room to a house or building it snaps into place and the walls overlap seamlessly. The Measure Distance and Measure Area tools let you make measurements simply by clicking and dragging. As you make these measurements, the outlines stay there for you to use as a reference in your layout. Just select them and hit delete if you want to remove them. Between the dozens of great looking examples and templates, hundreds of library symbols at your disposal, and the intuitive tools in the SmartPanel, you'll be creating detailed, professional looking floor plans in no time, with SmartDraw.