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Punch! 5 in 1 Home Design | 
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| From: Punch! Software
Category: Software
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $24.32
You Save: $15.67 (39%)
New (2) Used (1) from $15.00
Rating:  6 reviews
Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Windows Nt, Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows Xp, Windows 2000
Media: CD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Operating System: Windows NT
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 8.1 x 2.2
MPN: 352545
Model: 24100
UPC: 664446241009
EAN: 0664446241009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Home renovation software takes a big leap forward with 5 in 1 Home Design from Punch!, a package that lets you draw an imagined future home or work on altering the one you have--without investing in building materials or architects up front! Divided into a series of specialized applications, this program makes it simple to hone room layouts, design decks, fine-tune furnishing designs, and landscape any size or shape of building lot. And when the individual pieces are polished, 5 in 1 Home Design pulls everything together into the big picture of your dreams. Unlike many comparable packages, this package provides a fast and streamlined process for drawing floor plans from scratch. Moving wall by wall rather than room by room, a user can lay out everything in detail. Whether you are reconstructing an existing house or dreaming big, the program's learning process is swift. It is still possible to end up struggling to convince the package that an interior room is indeed inside the house (and thus deserving of carpet rather than lawn), but these glitches are rare and relatively easy to amend. Anyone interested in having a basic plan done both painlessly and fast will love the interface this program offers. Other tools in 5 in 1 Home Design allow you to walk through the three-dimensional model of your house, print out pieces of a model so you can build it yourself, and fit the home inside and out with furnishings and finishes. You can switch to these tools without ever shutting off the core floor plan, moving to an overhead view of the house and back, then breezing into a furniture-building application. To minimize headaches, all the data on each house is kept in a single file. In short, Punch! 5 in 1 Home Design will help you put together homes just as you imagine them. The power so handily available in this design program makes it an obvious first choice for those new to home design software and a real boon for anyone looking to brainstorm ideas for constructing, decorating, or renovating a house. --Alyx Dellamonica
Product Description
- Marketing Information: Power tools for serious home design PLUS Ultimate Deck for the perfect outdoor addition to your living space. 5 Powerful Programs in One that launch from the same easy-to-use interface, including our unique RealModel software that lets you build a 3D scale model of your home design! Product Information - Software Sub Type: Architectural - Software Name: 5 in 1 Home Design - Complete Product - Features and Benefits: 3D Home Exterior and Interior Design: - All program components work from the same simple interface, so all design tools and 3D capabilities are always at your fingertips. The LiveView window continually previews your work, in real-time 3D, as you draw. Ultimate Deck: - This feature includes powerful tools to give you complete control to design the perfect deck for your home plan. Multi-level or multi-story decks with 3D photo-realistic textures, stairs, railings, object placement, and color capabilities give you the ability to design exactly the deck you want. Deck Wizards walk you through railing, baluster options, and more. Choose a basic shape or create one and watch the program create a beautiful 3D rendering of your deck design.Ultimate Deck automatically calculates square footage so you can easily develop your materials list. And, since Ultimate Deck works seamlessly with all other parts of the program so can walk and fly-through your entire property. Your deck and landscaping come to life with photo-realistic 3D, c
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Could it be any worse? August 7, 2007
Ron Hood (Idaho)
I have experience with CAD drawing and other engineering drawing programs. While they all require a learning period before they are easy to use, this program never achieves that status. It is as if they took a bunch of different modules, each with different commands and vocabulary and slapped them together in a package.
Examples: The "Landscape" editor insists on slapping the landscape clean through buildings with basements. Roof pitch is a compound series of menus hidden in different parts of the program. There is no "Grab and move" feature to allow control of the roof line. It's nearly impossible for you to get interior walls to meet the inside of a roof without projecting through or missing entirely.
Common door styles are missing and if you want to update any inventory items you get to download a 176MB file hoping that what you want is in there. Walls don't snap square. The video "Help" is primitive and never completely covers a topic. The help index is missing almost everything you need help with.
In short... a huge waste of time and money. Do it with a ruler before you buy this program.
Worthless March 13, 2007
Robert (St Louis)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is total garbage. The object library is pathetic! No base corner cabinet? No problem, draw your own. Do not buy this. I can't overemphasize how bad this sucks.
 My first CAD experience April 15, 2006
phoenix (Austin, Tx)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My "significant other" gave my this program as a Christmas present 5 years ago because I was ALWAYS sketching out my "dream house" plans on graph paper...best Christmas gift I ever got!!!
I'm not an architect and, being on the south side of 50, was not particularly computer literate (had never even played computer games and, at the time, was even still a bit leery of using email!) It took me awhile - maybe 10 or 20 hours of experimenting with the program - to get the hang of using all the tools provided but I had a blast doing it. And the program certainly helped me to more clearly visualize the home I wanted to build. Being able to "walk through" the plan, put colors and textures on the walls, put furniture in the rooms, see the rooms from all angles, etc. was so helpful!
Yes, the 5-in-1 program is limited in some ways but that is to be expected with such an inexpensive CAD. There is a Punch! user's group online that is VERY helpful about suggesting work-arounds for some of the program's limitations. Plus, they'll help you solve any problems you run into. For example, the Punch! user's group taught me how to import textures when the specific ones I wanted (a metal roof texture and a particular pattern of wallpaper) weren't provided; they taught me how to "build" the kinds of doors I wanted using the furniture workshop tool, etc. Plus, they have a humongous number of user-made objects (indoor and outdoor furniture, household funishings, etc) that you can import from their website to use in your "house" if the object library provided in the software is too limiting and you don't want to take the time to "build" the item you want using furniture workshop.
(By the way, as a side benefit to using the 5-in-1 program and interacting with the punch user's group, I became much more computer savvy!)
Eventually though, I decided to move up to the Punch! 3000 program which, until recently, was Punch's top of the line program. Punch!3000 has a lot more features than 5-in-1 and I used it to design the house that I'm in the process of actually building today! (2 story, 3200 sq ft, 3 bedroom, 3 1/2 bath, wrap-around porch, backyard decks, complex roof-line with gables, dormer, and hip roof sections, etc.) I don't think I would have ever gotten the hang of using Punch! 3000 if I'd started with it first though. Punch! 3000 has so many tools, I suspect I would have been overwhelmed and would have just given it up and gone back to my graph paper. Starting with the 5-in-1 program tho, I learned the basics and gained confidence in what I could do.
I've recommended the program to a number of my friends and recommend it highly. I've never used any of the other CAD programs available but I'd be really surprised to find a program that was easier to use or more versatile that Punch! for anything near the same price.
Punch, Indeed! December 13, 2003
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
This product ensures that I will not purchase any other Punch product. Can't even remove partial walls, a basic requirement to drawing anything but a square or rectangular outside wall. Didn't even get as far as the home interior, due to problems with the exterior. Thought having home design and landscape together would be a great idea. I thought wrong. My old Sierra Custom Home worked far better, "help" was more helpful, and I will look for similar again.
5in1=waste of money February 9, 2003
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
This product does not only fail to meet the minimum expectations, it is deceptive in its advertising. For example, the programs of this type I've owned in the past all had a photo import feature so you didn't have to spend hours drawing something you could have a digital picture of. Secondly, the landscape section is extremely limited. I would never recommend this product.
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