When designing or remodeling a house, one of the essential pieces of information to keep in mind is the square footage of the rooms. Knowing the square footage allows you to calculate the amount of materials you’ll need and the cost of the project. However, this feature is not always available on the software you use for your drawings.
In this blog post, we’ll show you how to display square footage on your Chief Architect drawings. While there are likely different ways to achieve this, we’ll show you one method that uses global variables and polylines.
First, draw a room on the first floor and another room on the second floor. Then, create a polyline around your structure or living area. Assign a global variable to the polyline label and a text box. The variable should represent the area of the room or structure.
For example, in the text box, you can use the macro “$ a + $ b” to add the two areas together. You can also create a fancier text box that shows the square footage for each floor as well as the total square footage.
To do this, use different variables for each polyline label and text box. The global variables will allow you to display the square footage of each room or structure in different parts of your drawing without having to do any additional calculations.
While this method may seem like a basic feature that should be included in home design software, it is not always the case. However, it is a useful tool to have when designing or remodeling your home.
Note that this method is just an example, and there may be other ways to display square footage on your Chief Architect drawings. However, we hope this tutorial will help you achieve this feature in your future projects.