Drawing Area Measurements

When to measure an area

An Area measurement is a polygon you draw on the drawing. Its value is the real-world area inside it, worked out from the drawing scale, so an office outlined at 1:100 comes back in square metres (or square feet under the Architectural scale system).

Use it for anything billed by area: floor plates, ceilings for tile or plaster, roof coverings, cladding and glazing. The Area tool is always drawn by hand; Auto Takeoff finds linear runs, not areas.

Where the tool is

Open New Takeoff in the header and choose Area Measurement under the Takeoff heading, or press ⌥+A. A new Area group appears in the sidebar and the header button changes to Current Tool: area. Click it to put the tool away.

To add another polygon to an existing group, click on that group's sidebar row.

Drawing the polygon

1. 1

   Set the scale first if you have not already. See Setting the scale.

2. 2

   Hold Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) and click the first corner. A plain click pans the drawing instead.

3. 3

   CTRL+CLICK each remaining corner in turn, working around the outline.

4. 4

   Right-click to close the polygon. You do not need to click the first corner again.

The finished marker shows a dark area badge at its top-right corner, such as 400.00 m², and the sidebar group row shows the group total. Each polygon is listed under the group as Area 1, Area 2 and so on.

Concave outlines are fine. Keep polygons as simple as the shape allows; a room rarely needs more than one corner per wall.

Editing an area

Click the polygon to select it.

• Drag a grip to move that corner. The badge and sidebar value update when you release.
• Drag the polygon to move it whole.
• Press DELETE to remove the selected polygon, or use on its sidebar row.
• Hover a sidebar row for Duplicate marker, or right-click it for Focus, Duplicate and Delete.

To delete a whole group, open its menu and choose Delete Area Measurement. A confirmation follows because the action cannot be undone.

Scale on the group

Each Area group carries its own scale. Area scales with the square of the ratio, so a wrong scale is wrong by a large factor: a polygon read at 1:50 instead of 1:100 reports a quarter of the true area. ZeroCount handles the arithmetic; you only need the ratio to be right.

To change a group's scale, open its menu and choose Adjust Scale , pick a preset and click Confirm. Existing polygons in the group are recalculated. When a group's scale differs from the drawing default, adding a polygon to it opens Select Scale for New Group so you can choose which to use, and duplicating a polygon shows a notice that the copy inherits the group scale. See Per-group scale.

The linked variant

To price the area from the start, choose Area Measurement under the Linked Takeoff heading, or press ⇧+⌥+A. The item picker opens first; after you choose an item the tool arms with the group already linked. See Linked takeoff.

Common issues

The polygon closes in the wrong place

Right-click closes the shape from the last corner back to the first. If you right-clicked early, delete the polygon and redraw it, or select it and drag the grips into place.

The area reads in square feet

Measurements follow the scale system. Architectural displays square feet; Metric and Both display square metres. See The scale system.

No badge on the drawing

Badges follow Show measurements on canvas in Preferences and the Show Measurements tick in the Actions menu. The value is always in the sidebar. See Showing measurements on the drawing.

Next steps

• Drawing linear measurements — the same gestures for lengths, including closing a run into a loop.
• Per-group scale — when one group should carry a different scale from the drawing.
• Calibrating a drawing — check the scale against a known dimension before measuring areas.
• Exporting to Excel — how Area rows appear in the workbook, split by zone.