PartyCAD has matured in 2004. Version 7 knows how to cope with limited users, private projects, computer networks and attached drives. PartyCAD’s Project Manager can now manage hundreds of projects in multiple locations with ease. The Furnish module sports a spiffy new rotation control and supports persistent grouping of pieces. In Virtual Reality you can now look down through the top of a tent with the click of a button. Also, it is now easier to email clients your designs, and what you send can be printed to perfection. New furniture includes inflatables, bistro chairs, additional trade booth parts and a dozen new people. Read on to learn why PartyCAD 7 is the best PartyCAD ever.

New Folder Scheme

   In earlier editions of PartyCAD all projects were located in a single folder. With some fooling around this could be moved to a network drive, but the process was often difficult and confusing. No more. In PartyCAD 7 projects can be stored in any of four locations:

   Local Projects are stored on your local hard drive, the same as was done in previous versions of the program.

   Private Projects are stored in a special folder that is only available to the user who created the project. This can be a user with only limited privileges if security is an issue on your machine.

   Remote Projects are stored on a network drive and are  available to any machine connected to the network that has PartyCAD 7 installed.

   Other Projects can be stored on a removable drive attached to your machine. If you move projects back and forth between home and work, purchasing a cheap USB micro-drive will give you the ultimate in PartyCAD project portability.
 

Project Manager Improvements

   PartyCAD’s Project Manager has been extensively rewritten to support the new folder structure described above. Of course you can create, select, backup, restore and remove projects using the Project Manager, same as in the old days. Now though, you can displayed only projects at a specific location or of a specific type. You can hide projects that are infrequently used. You can move or copy projects from one location to another. All of these new capabilities make it much easier to manage large numbers of projects.

 

True Grouping In Furnish

   In earlier editions of PartyCAD you could create a group of pieces and move, rotate and duplicate the group. This was handy, but the group was not permanent. If you selected a piece that was not a member of the group, or loaded a new piece, the group automatically broke apart into its individual pieces. In PartyCAD 7 if you make a group, the group will be permanent until you are ready to break it.  Save an arrangement that contains groups, and the next time you load that arrangement, the groups will still be there.

   You can also save a group as a Grouped Piece of furniture. Such pieces are available from any project you work on and can be a definite time saver. All you need do is create a Grouped Piece that contains all the furniture you commonly use. Then, when you start a new project, just load this piece, break the group and you immediately have all the furnishings you commonly use close at hand.

New Rotation Control for Furnish & Layout

   A new rotation control has replaced the old “Moon Face” buttons in the Furnish and Layout Page modules. Now you can click on any dot in the rotation control to immediately rotate a piece or part in 45 degree increments. Or, drag up and down on the control to smoothly rotate the item, or as in times of old, enter the amount of rotation directly in a small box located above the rotation rosette. This new way  of doing things is quicker, more flexible and much more intuitive.

PDF’s and New Email Options

   In the past, PartyCAD emailed pictures by creating a message containing the picture and passing this to your normal email client (Outlook Express for instance.) This method is still available and works for most people, but now a second, more direct and faster method of emailing files to customers is available. This constructs a message and sends it directly through the mail server at your ISP.

   Another issue with the old email capability was that PartyCAD only sent JPG images of the screen. This is fine from the Virtual Reality or View module where you are sending pictures, but from Furnish or Layout Page the results were often fuzzy on the screen and looked just plain awful if printed. Now new Save PDF and Email PDF options in Furnish and Layout Page address the problem. When you use these, the current arrangement or page is saved as a high resolution PDF file which nearly any computer can open, view and print.

More Flexible Tent Tops and Sidewalls

   All tents created with the Tent Wizard now include solid and wire tops versions. New commands in the View and Virtual Reality modules allow you to change the type of tent tops on the fly. Thus, from in Virtual Reality you can set tent tops to Solid, Wireframe or Invisible, and you can turn Sidewalls on or off. This really speeds up the production of interesting and informative views.

New Furniture

Pieces in the PartyCAD Furniture Album now include:

·           An inflatable bounce tank and slide
       Bistro chairs

·           High-fashion drawings of people and groups of people

·           New pipe and drape parts for odd-sized booths

And That’s Not All

In addition we have added:

·    -More flexible File Lists that adjust automatically to long file names and display fewer, wider columns if a long name is present.

·    -A Printer Shift Command to assist in centering output pages, you can now set a distance that all pages will be shifted when printed from the Layout Page module.

·    -New videos that demonstrate everything that is new in PartyCAD Version 7.

What You Need

   To run at its best, PartyCAD 7 requires a modern machine with Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP. Some Windows 98 machines with very old graphics boards may experience difficulty with DirectX 8, but this is unusual. Contact us if you have any questions on this.

   You must have a CD drive to load PartyCAD, and you must have speakers on your machine to hear the videos. Other than that, if your machine runs Windows well, PartyCAD will work fine.

   PartyCAD can print to any Windows compatible printer connected to your computer.