Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Garden Planner Review

Faced with the daunting task of transforming a vacant fenced block of land, I was about to boot up Microsoft Visio (which I'd used before for house plans) before I thought to myself - "there must be a better way".

Well I found that way, and it is an affordable piece of shareware called Garden Planner.  However it takes a bit of patience.  On first use I was amazed by the sheer number of pre-loaded symbols for common landcaping including trees, fences, paths, vegetable gardens and the like. 

On the whole this software seems quite powerful and intuitive, although I found that initially I could not create a border or fence.  I worked out that you could double click to complete a border, but sometimes it just wouldn't allow you to delete and create a new one.  After several frustrating attempts of closing the software and reloading, I finally worked the quirks of the system and managed to - with several saves - get the hang of it.. Other than that, my only other griefs were that the software tended to crash and the scale and grid options are initially a little tricky to find.

But overall, Garden Planner is a neat and complete little piece of software that allows you to save, export and print a garden design.

Check it out at:
www.smallblueprinter.com/garden/