mistertheplague

When they moved Chief to subscription you could pretty much set a timer to HD following suit. You don’t have to spend much time in the CA ecosystem to realize that Chief rules the roost and everything they do is with Chief users in mind. Not criticizing, I’m sure Chief customers are their bread and butter. The HD suite has always been a weird offering. Clearly they set the prices/functionality so that Chief users wouldn’t dump the product and downshift to HD. Likely with the added hope that HD users would become invested in the CA ecosystem and upgrade to Chief if they used it for business purposes. Other software companies do this. Quicken is a notable example. Quicken Deluxe is simply Quicken Premier with a bunch of features turned off. The difference is that in Quicken the turned-off functionality is straightforward. Don’t need investments? Get Deluxe. A lot of the features from Chief they throttle in HD seem arbitrary, weird, and highly irritating. I’m wondering if they’ve seen a number of SSA Chief users who didn’t need Chief’s full functionality dump SSA and purchase HD. Or they anticipated that happening as they raise SSA prices YTY to reach the Chief subscription price. Regardless, this removes HD as a realistic option for serious DIYers and small contractors who only model projects occasionally.

I've been learning how to use HD Pro for several months, and in addition to the Home Designer training videos, knowledge base articles, help file, and reference manual (of course HomeTalk), I've found a lot of the training material for Chief Architect Premier to be very useful, if not invaluable. There is considerable overlap between CA Premier and HD Pro. Many of the training resources for CA Premier go into greater depth on topics and tools that both programs have. You'll quickly figure out which capabilities are CA-only. I also read and search ChiefTalk, the HomeTalk equivalent for CA users. Very illuminating. This is a powerful and complex program. Take any help you can get when learning it.

@xJonQx @solver Just found this workaround. Brilliant.

This is my plan. Topographical data from handheld GPS imported into the software apparently creates more noise than signal, according to @DavidJPotter. Perhaps I'm misremembering what he wrote. Besides, in my jurisdiction (also in PA) a professional survey is required with any permits to alter the exterior of a residence or certain aspects of a lot. In which case you'd need a survey anyway and thus could use it to update your .plan.