Punch Professional Platinum

I used this product in Canada when designing a major rebuild of our beach house. But then "lost" it when I lent it to an architect who wanted to check it out and then never returned it. Was delighted to find it available here in the UK and am now using it to completely renovate our French house with 3 new bathrooms, a new bedroom and a kitchen for our French house. Can't fault the product for the insanely low price!! And I don't get the criticism directed at it. I used in Canada on a computer with Windows XP and had no problems and am using it now on the same computer for the French house. 3D walk-through is brilliant and gives you a great feel of how things will look. There are some clumsy issues...moving walls for instance...but they are easily overcome with a little persistence and practice. You definitely do not have to start over. My only major criticism would be that it would be better if it had more range when it comes to scale. Only 4 options (as I recall) and the biggest scale could be bigger. To give you an idea: using the biggest scale available our entire house only fills about a 3rd-to-half the computer screen. But, you get used to it very quickly and I find it does the job. Great product for the price.

Most of the problems other reviewers had I managed to overcome with time. There is a learning curve and it takes a while to get used to the product's idiosyncracies - but that is true of any CAD-type product and you cant get around the fact that you are trying to find an easy way of presenting what is intrinsically a complicated task. As such, Punch do a reaonably good job of getting you up and running pretty quickly. It is only when you start to use the product in earnest that you come across its real limitations...This is clearly a US based product. As such it clearly "thinks" in Feet and Inches. Although an attempt has been made to produce a metric version this is far from satisfactory.Although dimensions can be specified and displayed in metric, the software rounds the metric value to an acceptable imperial equivalent e.g 250mm will be "rounded" to 254mm - which is a stupid metric value but makes alot of sense as 10". This may seem trivial but it runs through every operation and the inaccuracies build up.Try spacing doors and windows on a metric grid and watch in horror as 900mm changes to 890, 1.0m wide windows have to be 0.99m wide and so on. I can imagine my builder scratching his head when confronted with windows specified as 508mm high ("pity he asked for such an unusual size when I've got all these cheap ones at 500!")To make matters worse - all the default settings are in these hybrid values and most of them cannot be changed. Consequently individual elements have to be painstakingly adjusted after being drawn.As another reviewer mentioned, there is the presumption that you are going to build using timber frame construction methods - pretty rare on this side of the Atlantic. As a result, the range of thicknesses for walls, ceilings, openings etc are all based on imperial timber sizes rather than metric block sizes. Which brings us to the crunch...The most basic action you are likely to want to carry out, repeatedly for any domestic building is to draw a simple 250mm cavity wall around your house. Try it...1. When you choose to draw an external wall you find there is no preset size greater than 120mm and the default is 10mm!2. Since you cannot specify a non-preset size until after you have drawn it, you draw your wall, open its properties and reset its thickness.3. You now find that your drawing has gone awry and all your other dimensions have altered to allow for this new size.4. You go round trying to correct everything frustrated by the fact that almost every possible measurement seems possible except simple whole numbers (like 100, 200 etc!)5. You have to do this for every new external wall.Its a real pity this. Overall the tool would be great if you lived in the US and wanted to build a timber frame house. I dont and as such I found it more annoying than helpful.

I found this software quite difficult to pick up, as I'm used to drawing packages and stubborn, I kept going back, when stuck, seemed to get resolved as long as I took time out.It is Americanised the examples are totally useless for the UK unless you have a mansion. But you can convert, much more adaptable than 2 other design packs I had used beforeThis resulted in a catalogue of numerous attempts, i.e. as I began understand the package better, I found it quicker to redo from scratch. I did yesterday!.So progress so far after a year! walls, internal walls, roof windows and doors.I would still recommend this is very powerful software and once you become more fluent using it opens out creative opportunity, some accidents resulted in me considering some outrageous designs, good fun.Now I have the planning permission through I hope to be able to finalise details rather than paying the builders to change things half way through.

I had the previous version of this but found it crashed every time I tried to use the 3d feature, so I bought the platinum version hoping that would cure the problem. It hasn't. I have now found it works perfectly on my old pc which runs windows 2000. It's just that the 3d feature won't work (at all) on a machine running XP. Both programmes were advertised as XP compatible: they clearly are not. In trying to cure the problem I searched in vain for a website offering support, upgrades or downloads for the Uk version. On a more positive note, the platinum version has a number of useful features compared with the earlier one: especially the ability to insert a break in walls, which makes design changes significantly easier to make. As always, there is a steep learning curve but the online help is genuinely helpful. So, all in all, fine if you are not using XP but otherwise forget it...