While I've never used it for woodworking because I pull out my old high
school T-square for that, I have used Visio to design data centers before.
You can do quite a bit with Visio with walls, flooring and plumbing and then
define your own elements. It also has layering capabilities so you can peel
off layers to make other things visible. I did some things with it to put
in fiber cabling and cable trays which were all not native to the product.

I think it would work with woodworking but it has no 3-D capability that I
know about. Generally, when I got to that point, it was something for the
engineers to do and put it in a CAD system - which was nice as Visio allowed
me to export to a CAD format.

FWIW....


"mywebaccts (at) PLUGcomcast.net" "mywebaccts (at) PLUGcomcast.net" wrote
in message ...
Actually, I'm not even sure if CAD software is the correct terminology for
woodwork planning. Back on my last job, the mechanical engineers used CAD
packages to draw all sorts of 3D pictures. These packages could get
amazingly powerful ... with amazingly high prices too!

I'm just looking for something that would allow me to draw generic
pictures showing relative thickness of boards, placement of screws or
dowels or joint types, etc.

Now, I happen to have (purchased via Internet) Pat's plans for a really
nice fence. The pictures in his download file are far more elaborate than
I would need (albeit really nice!).

Anyway, I'd appreciate any suggestions for looking at various software
packages. I'm profient at CorelDraw, PowerPoint and others like that. But
they don't make construction drawings any easier.

Thanks!

Jack