Now that sounds like something I could use! I've forgotten most of what I
knew about Excel so the development sounds over my head but I would love to
'test' the concept if you find the time to develop it. I'll keep my 'eye' on
this thread!

Steve

wrote in message
...

Steve wrote:

Does anyone know of a good program for landscape design? Actually,
I'm more interested in a 'landscape inventory' program to help me
keep up with what is planted where and when, but I doubt that
anything that specific is available.


I'm thinking about doing something like this. It can be done in Excel-
you can make the cells perfectly square and have them represent a square
foot apiece. You could place circular shaped objects over this to
represent plants, and resize them, even color them to taste. The details
get a little complicated- it may take some programming experience- but
Excel does have the tools to do this. I'm pretty sure that you also
could hyperlink the plant objects to their inventory sheet, so that you
could have a map on one sheet and have your inventory on another, and be
able to access the plant on the inventory sheet by clicking on its map
picture and vice versa. I ordered a lot of things by mail this year. I
made a map with a demo version of Quick Draw Plus (worth a free try,
better suited to blueprints and circuit diagrams, but does include some
yard objects), imported that into an Excel document, and on another page
made a spreadsheet of plants that I was interested in. Going through
catalogs, I would enter the vendor, their website, price, and catalog
item number, and at the bottom it would show each vendor listed with the
total amount of my order from them. Then I could order the list by
vendor, go to the website, and go down the list entering the item
numbers that I had copied down. It's pretty versatile software.
Aside from the PITA of entering everything the first time, I had a lot
of trouble getting really good measurements of the distances between
everything, and the present and assumed future sizes of my plants. The (
sometimes steep) slope of my yard complicates that.
Still, just for the fun and challenge, I may try developing something
that would let you diagram your yard and enter your plants into it,
allowing you to enter information about the plants and maybe track
things (when fertilized, when to prune). If so, it's either going to be
in Excel or a Mac OS X native application, at least at first. That
leaves out Windows users who don't have Excel, but that's the breaks.
Apple gives you the developer tools for free, but it would cost a grand
or so for something that would facilitate that kind of database app in
Windows. If anything happens, I'll post it here, but don't hold your
breath. It's fairly complicated and it's a third priority.