Features & Tools:  

Home Designer Suite 8.0 has many of the tools that Punch’s Professional Home Design Suite does, and some nice extra bells and whistles that it doesn’t. One example is the curved wall tool, which is great if you want to design a parapet, or curved walls for your yard or porch.  

Most home design software has walkthrough and aerial views, but Home Designer Suite 8.0 lets you record both views to a video file (AVI format), which is great for demonstrations.  

The house building wizard lets you choose from a variety of pre-defined décor styles, ranging from what they call American Casual to Urban Chic/Contemporary, and it’s a good way to choose an overall design concept for your home. If you need further inspiration, the Design Planning Center has numerous articles and hundreds of pictures of professionally designed and decorated rooms, kitchens and house styles.

Support & Documentation:  

An extremely helpful Quick Start Guide greets you when you open Home Designer Suite 8.0 for the first time, and points you to the home design wizard. You can also watch the video tutorials and even search the home plan database. The printed manual is also informative, and perfect for either beginners, or experienced designers using it for reference.

Ease of Use:  

This software shines in ease of use. The buttons are indicative of their functions, and you can get a home designed in very little time with the included home templates.

Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 8.0 is a fairly easy to use home design program. As with all home design software, there is a learning curve, but with its fully editable home plans and design styles, it’s easy to get up and running. The main thing that kept it out of the number one spot was we had some trouble with the roof builder on split-level homes.