Plan Views are a visual way to design the bill of materials with your clients. In this Getting Started article, we will review how to:

All quotes come with a default Plan View. You will land on this view when you click the "Visual" tab in the quote. All aspects of Visual Quoting—Floor Plan, Location Boundary, Wirepath, and others are associated with a specific Plan View.

You can create multiple Plan Views in a quote to provide various options for the customer to choose from or as part of their review and feedback. To create a new Plan View, click "Plan View" in the toolbar and click "+New".

Every time you start from a new Plan View, you will be asked to upload a floor plan. We support PDF, JPG, GIF, and PNG file types and recommend uploading images greater than 800px by 800px for the best results.

*If you do not have a floor plan, you can skip this step and use location boundaries to draw boxes for each of your locations. We'll review this in the coming step.

Location boundaries are targets that represent each of the locations in the quote that you can drop items onto. The benefit of a location boundary is that after they are included in the drawing, new items dropped on the boundary will automatically be assigned to your bill of materials and also be assigned to that location - all in one click!

To draw a location boundary, first, click the new boundary icon for an existing location (shown in step 1 below). Next, click and drag your cursor over the area of the location and then release (shown in step 2 below).

Now that you have added your first location boundary, you can click on the boundary to view the editable properties of this object. This includes:

Next, we'll discuss how to add products/items. Here, we show you how to add items to the floor plan. Adding items to location boundaries is similar to this experience, except that new items will automatically get added to the relevant locations when using location boundaries.

To add items, you should be on the Products tab (in the top-right corner) in the Plan View. By default, you always land on this tab in a Plan View.

There are two ways to add items:

Below is a demonstration of using the "Click to add" feature to add items. This is useful when you need to see the item specs or other key details before adding it.

Another option to add new items is to use the "Quick Add" feature. Use this if you already know the specs and want to quickly add the item to the design.

You can also choose to show product icons and not product images on the floor plan. Check out this article for more details.

Next, we add wire paths using the "Wirepath" functionality. Wirepath is a cable length calculator that can help you estimate the cabling requirements without ever visiting the work site.

To add wire paths, go to the "Wirepath" tab in the top-left corner. Cloud will ask you to set a "Scale", which is the reference length for all wire paths you add. For example, across a door that is 32 inches wide.

Upon setting the "Scale", you can start adding the wire paths based on the actual cable paths required at the work site. Multiple wire paths can be added to emulate all cable paths. Cloud will automatically calculate the cable lengths for you. Upon adding the relevant cables and wires for each wire path, they get added as items to the quote.

Check out this article on common scenarios and use cases for using Wirepath.

Adding a comment to the drawing is done by selecting the "Comment" option in the "Markup" toolbar item and then clicking where you want to add the comment.

Comments are a great way to add details to the design and allow you and your team to have an internal conversation using the comment's reply feature.

You have two options for sharing your Plan Views.