How do I use the floorplan tools in Lucidchart?

Hi Pam! Great question.The floorplan scale feature in Lucidchart explained below allows you to create to-scale floorplans for your home office and event venues by using our shapes or importing your own drawing and matching up the scale.

 The key elements to designing your floorplan are:

• The Floorplan shapes on the left toolbox. Turn these on via the "More Shapes" button on the bottom left or by starting from a floorplan template. Make sure to check out the new measurement / scale object that you can add to the canvas. It will reflect the changes you've made in the scale.
• The gear option for changing the scale's units as well as proportions on the bottom left of the canvas where you can drag shapes.
• The Page Settings panel on the right side bar. Here you can adjust page size fit the content to the page change units of measurement and more. 

Using the scale tool:

The scale tool accessed on the bottom left of the canvas allows you to set your default unit as meters or feet for your scale. Then using the proportions on the right side of the bar you can set the scale in those units. Here you'll see that I have set the scale to be 1 inch of the canvas page = 5 feet. 

This scale allows me to properly adjust my walls to be the correct length.

Using the measurement object:

I can use the measurement object and place it on the canvas to verify the size of the wall or simply to have as a reference point for the scale if I export my document. You'll see below that the measurement object below the 10' wall tells you what proportion the scale is in and also gives you a visual reference.

Using the Page Settings panel:

The Page Settings panel shown above on the right allows you to set options for the grid in the background of your document as well as for the scale. 

• The Grid: The grid boxes that you see in the background are a great visual guide for floorplans especially if you match them up with your scale. Above you'll notice that the scale is set to 1 in = 5 ft. The grid size is also set to 'custom' and every 0.5 in. The 10' wall above makes it easy to see that there are 4 grid boxes for 10' matching the scale. You can also choose from several options for grid size if you don't want to create your own. For a consistent floorplan match it up with your scale.
• Content Scale: If you're using a floorplan I'd always recommend using the gear option to set your scale rather than setting it in this section. However this is also a good option for other users not using floorplans or if you're simply trying to scale something to fit a single page for printing purposes with the "Fit to Page" button.

If you're importing a floorplan from another program as an image make sure to re-size the image to fit the scale on the document or vice versa. 

In this example you can see that the imported image has a wall from Lucidchart pulled out next to it. By assuring that the measurement of one of Lucidchart's walls matches the wall of the imported image your scale should be set up properly.