How to draw an Area

This article will show you how to use Areas to organize your Canvas, making Product Lists and Dashboards more detailed. Areas are a great way to draw zones that break down your floor plan.

What are Areas?

You've used Canvas to create visuals like collages and vignettes, lay out your floor plans to scale, and even put together a furniture specification presentation and product list. Now, with the addition of Areas, you can start to break down your floor plan with smart areas that capture programming, square footage, and make your existing Product Lists more detailed and searchable.

Within Canvas, Areas are containers in which you group spaces with the furniture that is placed inside them. For example, you can have Areas for different room types - like, Conference, Lobby, Cafe, Library, and so on. Drawing Areas are helpful to overlay on top of your floor plan to better organize a floor plan or presentation. Canoa's Areas are smart; meaning, when you click into them, they provide dynamic metrics of that grouped space. Areas can also be filtered in Dashboards and Product Lists that live on the Canvas, making them more narrowed down and no longer capturing the entire Canvas.

Why use Areas?

• Define areas of your floor plan with a rectangle or with a custom shape, creating zones

• Ability to merge Areas for Dashboards and Product Lists

• Name the Area for better organization

  • When Areas have the same name, they will merge together into the same Product List

• Define fill color and opacity and outline styling

• Areas calculate dynamic metrics for you, like:

  • Square footage

  • Plannable area sf within a Dashboard or project

  • Cost per sf

• Search products included in the Area

• Create a pre-filtered Product List from an Area

• Create a pre-filtered Dashboard from an Area

Areas on the Canvas Toolbar:

The Area icon in the toolbar

1. From your Canvas dashboard, select one of your Canvas boards or create a new one.
2. In the top toolbar, you'll find the Draw Area icon, and it will turn purple when activated.

3. When you have the Draw Area tool selected, you will be prompted with two choices:

   • Draw a rectangle or a custom shape - Choose one and start drawing.

Creating an Area:

1. Click on the Draw Area icon or type A and the icon will turn purple when activated.

   1. Choose to draw either a rectangular Area or a more custom shaped Area with polylines.

2. Draw an Area around the items that you'd like to group together.

3. When the Area feature is active, you will continue creating Areas. Hit ESC to exit from creating Areas.

Naming your Area:

Naming your Area is helpful when organizing your Canvas and floor plan. Having a unique name for each Area helps you identify the Areas when filtering them within Product Lists and Dashboards. Contrarily, when Areas have the same name, they will merge together automatically when filtered into the same Product List or Dashboard - showing the overall budget for that merged Area type.

1. Click on your selected Area that you just drew and placed on your Canvas.

2. The Edit area / Pencil icon will appear below the Area when selected. Click the Pencil Icon to open up a right-side panel to add the name of the Area.

   • You can also double-click the selected Area, and the right-side panel will automatically pop open.

The Area name will only appear when the Area is activated (clicked on). The Area will appear gray if you do not choose a fill color for it.

Helpful Naming Tips:

• If you have multiple spaces or rooms of the same type on your floor plan or in your presentation, give the Area the exact same name for each type.

  • For example, I will design three conferences rooms that all fall under the same budget. So I will name their Areas "Conference 1C". This way, my furniture schedule will be easily filterable by conference rooms and show the bundled metrics all together.

Click on the Pencil icon to name the Area.

Customizing the Style of your Area:.

When you click on the Area you just drew and placed on your Canvas, four icons appear below the Area: Set fill style, Set stroke style, Edit area, and Export Selection. An Area will be given a default color of gray if you do not choose a fill color.

• Set fill style / Circle icon = Choose the fill color and the opacity level of the Area

• Set stroke style / Dash icon = Choose a solid line, dashed line, or dotted line, and then choose the thickness and the color of the line that will be the border of your Area

• Edit area / Pencil icon = Opens the side-panel to add a name, view the metrics, and search within the Area

Three style options to customize the look of your Area.

Searching within Areas:

1. Click the Area you'd like to search within, and click the Pencil Icon to initiate the right-side panel. (You can also double-click the Area).

2. Type in the name of the product you are looking for in the Search Bar within the Area side-panel.

   • The dynamic metrics will auto-populate.

Pro Tip: Choose to include Areas in the Column Settings of a Product List. This way, when you export the schedule to a CSV file, Areas will be included as a data column that you can sort by in your next spreadsheet program.