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#1
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Landscape Software
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. THANKS! |
#2
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Landscape Software
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 just use an Excel spreadsheet - columns for plant name, description (if necessary) date planted and location. Pretty simple and easily updated. Compiling the thing in the first place is the most work - only then do you realize exactly how many darn plants you have! pam - gardengal |
#3
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Landscape Software
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. THANKS! I just use an Excel spreadsheet - columns for plant name, description (if necessary) date planted and location. Pretty simple and easily updated. Compiling the thing in the first place is the most work - only then do you realize exactly how many darn plants you have! pam - gardengal |
#4
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Landscape Software
Oops! I failed to explain my entire desire. I would like to 'graph' the
plant's location in relation to others, the house, etc. so I am looking for a way to graphically depict the landscape. I will be skipping the 'design' step and using the design to maintain the inventory. I am working on a database (that I will keep on my palm pilot) of the details but would like the 'picture' as well. Maybe that makes sense! "Pam" 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. THANKS! I just use an Excel spreadsheet - columns for plant name, description (if necessary) date planted and location. Pretty simple and easily updated. Compiling the thing in the first place is the most work - only then do you realize exactly how many darn plants you have! pam - gardengal |
#5
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Landscape Software
Steve wrote: Oops! I failed to explain my entire desire. I would like to 'graph' the plant's location in relation to others, the house, etc. so I am looking for a way to graphically depict the landscape. I will be skipping the 'design' step and using the design to maintain the inventory. I am working on a database (that I will keep on my palm pilot) of the details but would like the 'picture' as well. Maybe that makes sense! Makes perfect sense! However, as a professional landscape designer, I have yet to see the home software that is effective in achieving this result. The easiest thing to do is get some graph paper and a pencil and sketch out your plantings. It needn't be to scale - just a rough drawing of each planting area with the plants designated and labeled. Changes are acccommodated easily and rapidly and you can add notes about future changes, planting dates, etc. as you wish. This is exactly what I do (no time to do drafted, scale drawings of my own garden!) and my Excel inventory corresponds to each area. Since my plantings are pretty intensive, this is far easier than using less than ideal software programs, which seldom allows for the degree of layering and overlap that occurs in most real life gardens. pam - gardengal |
#6
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Landscape Software
There isn't one... but the boxes they come in look awefully good!!! On Mon, 07 Apr 2003 15:03:09 GMT, "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. THANKS! |
#7
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Landscape Software
ZMUD (oddly) is a game/chat client. Although it doesn't have anything to
do with landscaping, the mapping function allows graphical relationships and uses an entailed database. The programt concerns internet communication though, and in my brief experiance with it I read that Zugg, its creator, was looking for profitable ideas. Perhaps you could contact zuggsoft, having down all this work already in another fashion and his understanding of abstracted time and spaces, may prove useful. Steve wrote: Oops! I failed to explain my entire desire. I would like to 'graph' the plant's location in relation to others, the house, etc. so I am looking for a way to graphically depict the landscape. I will be skipping the 'design' step and using the design to maintain the inventory. I am working on a database (that I will keep on my palm pilot) of the details but would like the 'picture' as well. Maybe that makes sense! "Pam" 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. THANKS! I just use an Excel spreadsheet - columns for plant name, description (if necessary) date planted and location. Pretty simple and easily updated. Compiling the thing in the first place is the most work - only then do you realize exactly how many darn plants you have! pam - gardengal |
#8
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Landscape Software
Pencil and paper? Boy, that takes all the fun out of it! I just about have
my wife convinced I need more software, I can't let her see you post! You two aren't in cahoots are you? THANKS! "Pam" wrote in message ... Steve wrote: Oops! I failed to explain my entire desire. I would like to 'graph' the plant's location in relation to others, the house, etc. so I am looking for a way to graphically depict the landscape. I will be skipping the 'design' step and using the design to maintain the inventory. I am working on a database (that I will keep on my palm pilot) of the details but would like the 'picture' as well. Maybe that makes sense! Makes perfect sense! However, as a professional landscape designer, I have yet to see the home software that is effective in achieving this result. The easiest thing to do is get some graph paper and a pencil and sketch out your plantings. It needn't be to scale - just a rough drawing of each planting area with the plants designated and labeled. Changes are acccommodated easily and rapidly and you can add notes about future changes, planting dates, etc. as you wish. This is exactly what I do (no time to do drafted, scale drawings of my own garden!) and my Excel inventory corresponds to each area. Since my plantings are pretty intensive, this is far easier than using less than ideal software programs, which seldom allows for the degree of layering and overlap that occurs in most real life gardens. pam - gardengal |
#9
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Landscape Software
On Mon, 07 Apr 2003 21:30:27 GMT, Pam wrote:
Steve wrote: Oops! I failed to explain my entire desire. I would like to 'graph' the plant's location in relation to others, the house, etc. so I am looking for a way to graphically depict the landscape. I will be skipping the 'design' step and using the design to maintain the inventory. I am working on a database (that I will keep on my palm pilot) of the details but would like the 'picture' as well. Maybe that makes sense! Makes perfect sense! However, as a professional landscape designer, I have yet to see the home software that is effective in achieving this result. The easiest thing to do is get some graph paper and a pencil and sketch out your plantings. It needn't be to scale - just a rough drawing of each planting area with the plants designated and labeled. Changes are acccommodated easily and rapidly and you can add notes about future changes, planting dates, etc. as you wish. This is exactly what I do (no time to do drafted, scale drawings of my own garden!) and my Excel inventory corresponds to each area. Since my plantings are pretty intensive, this is far easier than using less than ideal software programs, which seldom allows for the degree of layering and overlap that occurs in most real life gardens. I agree with Pam. Gardening is too random and/or too full of variables to make for an easy computer app to suit particular needs. I searched on "landscape design software" and turned up several interesting-looking references. However, having had several experiences trying to use various CAD packages, I'd say unless one were planning to master the software and go into the business of supplying plans to others, some graph paper and a pencil with an eraser will probably yield a better return. |
#10
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Landscape Software
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. |
#11
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Landscape Software
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. |
#12
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Landscape Software
I'm using Microsoft Visio (professional) this year. I bought it for other
small business applications but it has a landscaping module. Nothing fancy, mostly generic shapes you'd find on a stencil. Before Viso I used pencil and graph paper with the staedler landscaping stencil kit you can find at Office Depot. mm "Kevin Miller" wrote in message news:4F4744435272F4F9.BA2DE50E637FE3C6.6104E480FCA ... There isn't one... but the boxes they come in look awefully good!!! On Mon, 07 Apr 2003 15:03:09 GMT, "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. THANKS! |
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