Better Homes and Gardens Landscaping and Deck Designer 8.0

I have had a short time after much research in the various brands. For the money, this one is highly rated. Since I have no previous experience with this kind of program, was not sure what to really… expect. It has significant capabilites, but is a little more complicated that I expected. WHile I am still learning how to use it, it is not as intuitive as I had hoped it to be. Overall, a very nice program.

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I've really enjoyed working with this product. It's been very helpful with the layout of our yard and garden. And it's also taught me a lot about plants and what I like and dislike. It does require TIME and… patience, especially time. Utilizing the help tool is very helpful, but once you have the hang of it, it runs fairly smoothly. Something to aware of, the program doesn't have every kind of plant out there that you might be interested in. But there is a fairly broad variety and if you can't find the exact plant, you should be able to find something somewhat similar. Also, if you are trying to perfect the design of your house, don't rely on this program. This program is strictly for the design of your yard and deck.

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We purchased this product based on a recommendation from another website since we recently moved into a new home with no backyard. We are planning to do a patio and planting beds in our backyard and I… thought this software would assist us in the planning process. I have found that this software is not particularly user friendly (I am pretty tech savy) and has limited functionality for basic planning steps such as designing an actual patio. The plant selection has a fairly limited plant selection database as well for people that live in a hot, arid climate (Austin) like myself. This program seems better suited for people that are actually re-designing parts of their home and not people that are trying to use it to design a new landscape for their home.

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The two posted reviews for this product are stark contrasts to each other. I think that if you have loads of extra time or are paid by the software designer, you might find this product useful. But for the… remaining 99.99% of us, well, just read on. The first day I got this software, I built the house, painted the walls green, and aside from a struggle to get the roof to look like my house's roof, it went okay, so I was still optimistic. The next day, I anxiously sat down and started to lay out the perimeter of my yard, and after another struggle to get the curve in the road for my front border, I was a little frustrated, but it turned out okay. Then after trying to get a gentle slope down from the house and managing to create big mountains in the yard, I learned how to use the undo button...over and over. I tried to design a deck in the back, and the act of doing that changed the color of the house back to a drab gray color. So I changed it back to green, and decided to erase the deck and try for a different design. And my house was gray again. Aarrrgghh!!! Did I mention that my garage door appeared a foot above the driveway? I don't own a Hummer, so I tried to lower the door (can't do it) then raise the driveway (more mountains). All I got was more practice with the undo button. Okay, I gave up on the deck and the garage door for the time being, and decided to try to create some raised areas where I thought some decorative rock and some bushy things and maybe a tree would look good. Well, the terrain feature tools only allow a kidney bean shape, a rectangle, or a circle. These can be modified by selecting the object (which is a major chore in itself - first you have to right click on it, then select object. But by now, the "floorplan" view looks like a mangled mess of lines, because it shows all the elevation lines, some dimension lines of the house, fence, plot lines, sidewalk, road, camera angle lines, and I haven't even planted any trees or bushes yet - so every time you try to click on something to modify, you stand a GREAT chance of clicking on something nearby. AND if you forget that you need to right click first, you will have a new terrain feature where you just clicked...undo button) Where was I? Oh yeah, the shapes of the rocky areas - I wanted to create a curvy line to run along the sides of my driveway, and these three shapes don't allow that. Undo button. So they have this tool for creating a landscape curb, and although I didn't want a curb, I assumed I could use that to frame what I wanted so as have an area to plant bushes. Sigh...You can't just draw a curvy line. There is a "spline curb" tool, which supposedly makes curves by clicking and dragging straight sections of curb that will attach themselves end to end to each other after they're drawn. Finally, I figured how to create a beautiful curvy border for my rocky area. Problem solved, right? Wrong. It doesn't work. I ended up with a bunch of parking blocks in my lawn. Forget the undo button. I give up. Trust me, you will too. The tutorial videos are indeed short, and they do show you how to use basic functions. But there are no answers for most of the questions that you will encounter. You must trial and error your way through this non-user-friendly program to accomplish anything in your mind's eye. I thought the whole purpose of a landscape program was to quickly try many different ideas for landscaping and see it in 3-D before you do any grunt work in your yard. But you end up doing tons of grunt work by just trying to figure out how to use this annoying product. The most frustrating thing is how exhausted you feel, and then you catch a glimpse of your yard out the window and realize that you haven't done anything yet. I guess you could probably create what you want if you spend months of agonizing time in front of your computer, that is if you can resist the urge to chuck it through your living room window and onto your neglected dirt lawn. Seriously, you could spend as much time getting your yard the way you want it in this program as you would just drawing it on a piece of paper, then actually landscaping your actual lawn! Use your fifty bucks for an extra bush instead of buying this useless program.

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