Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsFUBAR
Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2018
I just got the DVD edition of Chief Architect Home Designer Suite 2018 and was eager to get started with it, having been using one version or another for the last decade or more. I have drawn hundreds of "dream houses" over the years, which unluckily were all lost in the last computer crash. But with a new computer and the 2018 edition of Home Designer, I was raring to go again.
However, the bright boys at Chief Architect have ruined this program beyond all recognition. It is not possible to draw, say, a 12' by 14' room and see the dimensions displayed inside the room. No, the dimensions all display on the *outside* of the house now. You have to zoom in or out and run your pointer all over the screen to see or adjust room sizes.
And when you can see the room dimensions, they do not say 12 x 14 but instead 11'11" by 13'6" or something. Now I do know how to change dimensions and I do know how to set display preferences - but nothing would make it display in the ordinary way that every other edition has. Finally in the depths of a Help file, I found a little box that said the inside dimensions by default show the distance between *framing walls*, not wall surfaces. WTF? What is the point of that? That is NOT what I want, nor can I find any way to change that default.
I am just a hobbyist, not a professional architect or builder. I draw my rooms, nearly all of them, in nice round numbers of feet. This ruins the experience for me, and I want to warn all other prior users that the 2018 edition is seriously messed up. I didn't try to go any further with it, and I am sorry now that I blew a hundred bucks (I am retired, on a fixed and very limited income) on this POS. The last edition I had, Home Designer 9.0, worked great and was easy to learn and use. But not this one. Buyers, beware!