Designing Floor Plans with PowerPoint: Space Planning and Visual Layouts

Welcome to lesson six, Introduction to Interior Design. In this lesson, we are going to show you how to create your floor plan using PowerPoint. We're going to talk about how to create an interior elevation rendering using PowerPoint, and I'll give you some presentation techniques that I think are worth considering along the way.

Now before we get started, I just want to be very clear with all of you. If this method does not work for you, but you are familiar with, let's say, Photoshop or Canva, you are welcome to use any software program that you are comfortable with. However, we will be focusing on how to use PowerPoint in this lesson, so let's jump right into it.

All right, so the first aspect of the final project that we need to talk about today is creating the floor plan using a PowerPoint method. So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to make sure that you have all of the drawings saved. Okay, so when I say drawings, you can actually use the PowerPoint, so just make sure you've got the PowerPoint saved.

And in this lesson, I will explain to you how to open up the PowerPoint and how to use the PowerPoint, take screenshots, and use the information to create your layout. It's advisable that when you're copying and pasting furniture that you hold the shift key down when you're resizing. I'll demonstrate that in just a couple minutes here.

And then you're going to add the pre-drawn furniture template that I've created for you, or you can use your own furniture. And again, I'll go through all of this in this lesson so that it's clear for you. You're going to crop the desired furniture or the pieces of furniture that you'd like to use on the plan, and then you're going to start using those to create the interior design space plan for your final project.

So you'll plan with efficiency in mind. You'll also only use the necessary furniture to achieve your space planning goal. And as I mentioned in the last lesson, it's important to keep things simple and to think about your client.

Now if your client, if their best approach would be using one or two pieces of furniture, I would suggest taking that same approach. Don't over clutter the space. Keep things simple.

And I will demonstrate how to do that as we move into this lesson recording. Now some considerations. As you copy and paste items, you're going to notice that scales can change.

The size of the object can change. I'm going to give you some techniques to make sure that you're keeping the project to scale. You're going to want to consider removing backgrounds, and I'll show you how to use the crop command in PowerPoint as well.

You're going to want to consider furniture style. Now again, you can use our template, or you can find your own template of furniture that you're going to use. All we ask is that you're efficient with your space plan, and that you make sure that whatever you decide to do for your space planning is appropriate for that client.

Remember to keep the plan black and white. The elevation will be rendered in color. All right, so creating a furniture plan.

So in this lesson, we have the sheets, the PowerPoint sheets that you need to create this plan. And as a refresher, I've done the template for you. We have, you know, a 10 foot by 20 foot space that we're going to work with.

And we are going to design the layout using this space. All right, so the plan that you're seeing is the template. Now I've got a slide dedicated to use for this presentation, and I'll demonstrate that in just a second.

But I would suggest using this slide as you're creating the floor plan itself. And you're also going to use the furniture and the templates that I've created for you to use if you desire to do so. Now you may say, again, I don't want to use this furniture.

My client is very modern or contemporary, and I'd like to go download a CAD block of a piece of furniture that they would use. That's okay as well. The important thing is that you have something to work with, and you're being efficient with your space plan.

Now remember, I spoke about the scale and keeping scale. It's very important. So as you go through this, you're going to have to keep that in mind.

These are the slides that you are welcome to use for your furniture templates, and I will demonstrate that in just a second. Now your goal is to lay out the plan as efficiently as possible and to keep things to scale, right? Whether it's a sofa, whether it's a chair. And the nice thing about the plan, the furniture template that I'm giving you, is I've already told you what size or scale each of those pieces of furniture are.

So there's no question as far as, okay, this chair is supposed to be, you know, one foot eleven inches or two feet. Let's do it around two feet. You know what the size and scale of that piece is because I've given it to you.

Now keep in mind, if you go and find your own piece of furniture, right, like you can see I've got a kind of a unique ottoman and chair in this image. If you find your own furniture, it's imperative that you know the size of that piece of furniture. Because if you know the size, you can then use the scale that I've provided to scale the piece of furniture appropriately.

So let's dive into it. Okay, so you have these PowerPoint slides that I've given you, right? And you've decided that you do want to use some of the furniture and the interior elements that I've given you. So what can we do? Well, you can use this slide.

You can literally come over. You can right click and you can duplicate the slide or you can copy it. And that, you know, I can click copy and I can paste it.

You know, I can right click and then paste the slide into my deck. So you've got the template with you, right? Once you've got the template, I like to use the snipping tool. So I can come over here.

I can type in snipping tool and it'll say, what do you want to snip? You could also use a screenshot. Either are okay. But what we're going to do is we're going to create a new snip and we're going to grab the chair that we want or the piece of furniture and we're going to do, we're going to create a copy.

Now once you've got that copy, you want to then go to the actual plan that I'm saying. This slide is a template and you can use the keyboard and just click control V or you can right click and go to paste. Either works.

And again, you remember I said it's important for you to know the scale. We know that this chair is roughly two feet. So I'm going to move this chair over to this corner and I'm going to use the bottom right and I'm going to drag this until I get edge to edge is roughly two feet.

Now if you're off by a half an inch or an inch, it's okay. This is a general idea of what you want to do with your furniture plan. If you know that the sofa is six feet in length, you will drag this until you get the six foot mark.

So basically you're using my scale as a standard so you know how large things are. And keep in mind when you use the snipping tool or when you copy and paste, it could resize the object a little bit smaller. And if that's the case, that's why we need this scale in place.

We know basically from this edge to this edge that that chair is supposed to be two feet. Once you have that, you can essentially place the chair wherever you think is appropriate. Now you may go through a couple of design iterations.

You may play with it and you may say, okay I've got the chair. Now I'm going to come over here to my rotate tool and I'm going to rotate the chair 90 degrees to see what the chair looks like in that position. The other thing you can do is copy.

We can do a CTRL C on this piece of furniture and then I can click out to kind of deselect and I can CTRL V and make a copy of that piece of furniture if you know that that's a piece of furniture you're going to be using more than once. And once you have the furniture, you click on it and you go over to picture format and here is where you can rotate and change things around. If you have a clip and it's a little bit larger than you've anticipated, you can also grab the crop and you can grab the top edges and you can crop.

If I wanted let's say half this chair, I wouldn't do that but let's say I do. I crop it down and then I just left click and it literally crops it for you. So you're going to go through, you're going to select each piece of furniture that you want to use and you're going to play with the design layout until it makes sense.

So using the templates, you copy the furniture, you bring it into the document. We need to verify that the size of the furniture matches the scale and once we've got that, we can kind of move forward. So you know in my template, I have a sheet that shows a six-foot sofa.

So let's do it again. I could use the snipping tool. I can do a new clip.

I want to get it close to the edge as I can and I'm just cutting just the sofa itself. Now once I've done that, it's taken a screenshot. I can close this and I can go to the furniture using this slide as a template and I could do a control v and paste that furniture in.

Now again, we know that this sofa is supposed to be six feet. When we brought it in, it scaled it down. That's okay.

We take this sofa, we line it up with the left edge of the scale and we grab the corner and we drag it until we get to the six foot mark. And once we've got that, that piece of furniture is now to scale. We don't want to mess with it.

We just want to move it into whatever position we want. We can go over again. We can crop if we need to crop edges or we can go down here and we can say, oh we're going to rotate or flip it vertically, flip horizontal.

You have lots of options as far as how you can adjust the furniture and all you need to do is place the furniture in its appropriate location. Now again, you have a crop dire. If you bring the furniture down and you've got this white space here, you could just click on picture format, go over to crop and we can grab this and we can pull it up until it crops that piece of white that we don't want and now you've cropped that piece of furniture.

And that's it. It's that simple. The plan is for you to take the furniture plan that I've given you and arrange the furniture.

And I'm not going to tell you how to arrange the furniture. You have to do this based off of your creativity and what we've learned in all the lessons over the past few weeks. So you design a furniture layout that makes sense and that will be your final furniture plan for the final project.

So again, use the slide, use the furniture templates, use the crop or the screenshot or the snipping tool. Bring them into the furniture plan until you've got the furniture that you've liked that you like. And again, keep it simple.

You may not want to overdo this. This space may you may want to do a couple of pieces of furniture and we go over to let's say picture format and we want to rotate you know or flip this horizontal and we want to put two chairs right next to each other kind of in front of this window. That may be the design goal for your client for your project.

Each project is going to be completely different. All I ask is that the furniture and the floor plan stays black and white because we are going to be using color rendering for the elevation itself. So in the end you will have a layout that makes sense, that's spatially efficient, and that utilizes some of the templates that I'm giving you right.

This is just one example of many layouts that you may utilize. Now depending on who your client is will depend on how and what type of layout you create. A couple things to keep in mind.

Remember the door needs to stay clear. Don't put anything in front of the door for ADA reasons. Also we want to make sure that we have a 60 inch turning radius right.

So keep the codes in mind as far as the instructions for the assignment. Use the snipping tool. Bring your furniture in.

Make sure that you verify that the furniture is the appropriate size. If I move this over here I can see yes this sofa is six feet in length. And looking at the template we know that that furniture piece is supposed to be six foot.

And then we can use that and we could copy this piece of furniture and use it again if we'd like to put another sofa here. But we also need to be careful the doorway. And you basically are going to do the layout of the design.

And you know you can do this in PowerPoint. You know again you can also use Canva or Photoshop or anything else. But this tutorial will allow you to use and start designing layouts just using PowerPoint.

Great. In the next video we'll discuss creating an elevation using PowerPoint.