[lsamberg]

One of the threads a while back was extoling the virtues of Intellidraw.
One of the features that I found useful (if I am remember the right program) was the ability to set a scale: e.g. 1" = 2' for a drawing.

Then I could draw a rectangle and set the size to 12' x 10' (I think I was designing an addition to my house at the time) and the rectangle would be drawn to 6" x 5" on the screen. If I drew a dimensioning line on one edge it would indicate "12 ft"

This made life a lot easier and avoided lots of calculations.