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Measure the Interior Area of a Floor Plan

  • Updated

SmartDraw has a built-in measurement tool for measuring the area of any space. This is really useful for quickly getting the square footage of a room or a house. 

Use the Show Area Option to Measure the Interior Area of a Floor Plan

After drawing the outline of your house:

  1. Select the outline
  2. In the Design tab, click on Dimensions
  3. In the Dimensions dialog, navigate to the Show Area section and select "Of the Shape" 
  4. The area for your house or room will be shown in the center of the shape. 

 

It's that simple. 

This works as long as your floor plan outline was built using continuous walls to create a "closed shape". This means that the last wall drawn is connected to the first wall you drew and each wall along the way is connected to the next.

You can create a closed outline and add doors, windows, and even blank wall openings without breaking the outline that allows SmartDraw to calculate the area. 

This is the recommended method of drawing a floor plan outline and it will allow you get an accurate area measurement of your floor plan. 

Add Gaps Using the Wall Opening Tool

SmartDraw can't calculate the area if your floor plan doesn't have a closed outline. If you created a gap by not connecting your walls, the area calculation will not work. We recommend closing all the gaps, connecting your walls, and then only adding wall openings using the Add Wall Opening Tool instead.

Using the Measure Area Tool

If you can't close your outline or if you want to measure a smaller portion of your floor plan, you can use the Measure Area tool in the SmartPanel. 

  1. Expand the Dimensions & Area section of the SmartPanel, located to the left of your canvas
  2. Click on Measure Area
  3. The Measure Area tool lets you draw a red rectangular shape over any area of your floor plan and displays the measure area in its center

 

Note: to get the rectangular placed more precisely, we recommend turning off Snaps in the Page tab. Go to Snaps under Page and select Do Not Snap to Grid.

The limitations of this method is that it can only draw a rectangular shape so to measure any irregular areas, you'd have to draw multiple rectangles and add them up. 

This is why the preferred method of measuring the area of a floor plan outline is to use a closed outline and the Dimensions properties.