AS BUILT Drawings Made Easy

Here's an easy solution to creating great looking floor plans and site maps

     

“As Built” diagrams and floor plans are handy tools to have, but the problem we often face as Rangers is a serious lack of time needed to create these from scratch if we aren’t lucky enough to already have architectural drawings. The computer programs that do this kind of thing, called “Cad” or Computer Assisted Diagramming or Drawing, are expensive and usually take some time to master. Besides that, most are too powerful for our purposes anyway – a lot like buying a pneumatic framing nailer to hang a few pieces of molding – it’s simply overkill.

 

A while back I was frustrated by the drawings we had – most looked like they were scrawled on napkins – and the CAD approach was clearly more than I really needed. Hunting around for a solution, I found a simple way to create professional looking floor plans and campsite maps using – of all things – PowerPoint. Seriously, it works. The diagram below is a floor plan for one of my cabins made using nothing more than PowerPoint and Paint to create the floor plan and characters.

 

 

Pretty good, eh? Is it true Auto-CAD? No. It isn’t even really to scale, but it’s close enough for our purposes, which is usually all about showing what features a building has, where key mechanicals and items are located, access, and general layout. For any of that, the drawing isn’t required to be to exact scale, so a drawing like this – a representation really – is plenty. You can even add in dimensions, they just won’t be either automatic (Auto-CAD can automatically calculate the length of a scale line…), or to scale, but again, no one but you will probably know, notice, or even care.

 

One really cool feature is that PowerPoint allows you to duplicate slides at any point. So if you have a basic floor plan created, you can make several duplicate slides that can then have additional details added creating one plan that shows all the bulb and battery locations, another for extinguishers and other safety gear, another for water lines, another as an electrical circuit plan, one for winter bunk set-ups, another for summer usage, and so on and so on.

 

So how do you do it?

            The process is pretty simple. Start with a rough drawing and some notes of what you have to draw. The best way is to decide what features will be common to any version you might need in order to create that basic plan, then sit down and open a new PowerPoint file.

• Begin by using the line tool or the box tool to create the outline of your building. If you use the box tool, you will have to double click on the box and tell the dialog box that comes up that you want No Fill to eliminate any color, at least on this first box. Double clicking on any line allows you to adjust the weight or thickness of any line.
• Once you have the solid lines of the walls, both interior and exterior in place, then you can start adding windows, doors, and other details. Select Insert from the menu bar and then select Picture and choose one of the Pictures I’ve provided or create one of your own in Paint or some similar drawing program. Once the picture is on the slide, you can move it around, enlarge or reduce its size, even stretch it (such as doors and windows) and set it where you like.
• Using the Text Box tool allows you to neatly label rooms and other objects (see the example above).
• “Erasing” small imperfections or items can be as easy as laying a solid white box or circle over the item you want to hide. Just double click on the box or circle and change the fill color to white. Be sure to set the border for No Border.
• Once you have your drawing set up the way you want it, Save the file. Then click Save As and do the following:
• In the dialog box, change the file type to JPEG from PowerPoint Presentation and click OK.
• It will then ask if you want all the slides saved or just the current slide – select current slide only and name the file something specific. I usually use a system like “Cook’s Cabin – Bulbs and batteries.jpeg”
• Be sure to save these files to someplace where you can find them. I’ve created a folder on my desktop called Maintenance Maps so I can find them easily.
• Doing this “double save” preserves the PowerPoint presentation as a working copy so you can make further modifications and creates a JPEG image that you can use as a map or basis of further drawings.

 

That’s all there is to it!

 

Campsite maps are almost as easy. Start the same way, but hand draw the basic features such as the roads, trails, streams – all the squiggly stuff that PowerPoint can’t do – and scan that sheet of paper (I use an 8 ½ x 11 blank sheet of printer paper to start) into your computer as a JPEG. Then insert that onto your blank PowerPoint slide first and add all the other features and characters on top of that the same way you did with the cabin drawing. If you do it right, your site map will look like this:

 

 

 

You can use a single clump of trees and stretch it or enlarge it, shrink it, or rotate it so that they don’t all look the same, but a map like this makes repairs or documenting various issues a breeze.

 

Now if your finished JPEG is too big, either in size or in the file size, you can reduce the images easily by using a photo lab program such as MGI PhotoSuite, or Corel PhotoShop. Those programs always have some kind of image reduction feature and some, like PhotoSuite, even compress the image so that it will be suitable for loading onto your website – this is what we did on www.nepabsacamps.org in order to show the layouts of all our campsites and lodges. Just be sure to first save the original file, then do a “Save As” and name the file something different. To keep things organized, I simply add the suffix of “- 300W” or “ - 500H” to indicate the size of the reduced image, 300W meaning 300 pixels wide, 500H meaning 500 pixels high, and so on. So using the naming example above, my original file would be named “Cook’s Cabin – Bulbs and batteries.jpeg” with the copy being named “Cook’s Cabin – Bulbs and batteries – 350W.jpeg”.

 

We’ve posted the various characters created to date at the bottom of this page. Simply right-click on each image and select Save Image As… to download each image. Be sure to save them to someplace on your system where you can find them easily.

 

So there it is, quick and simple. If you bump into any problems or have any questions or comments, feel free to send me an e-mail at tbongard@nepabsa.org .

 

Ranger Tim Bongard, Camp Acahela and Goose Pond Scout Reservation  

If you have any questions, or comments, please send them to tbongard@nepabsa.org .

 

 

AS BUILT Characters and Images