Every Button in the Kitchen Designer

Two regions, and no menu bar

The first thing to unlearn: there is no menu bar across the top, and nothing down the left. The whole tool lives in two places, and once you know which is which you can find any control in a second.

• The canvas — the plan in 2D or the room in 3D. A tool strip floats along its top, and the elevation drawing docks underneath it when you turn that on.
• The right sidebar — everything else: the logo, your account, the language picker and theme, the 2D / 3D switch, the catalog, the Flip Board of colours and finishes, the Move Object pad, the Design Helper and the quote.

That sidebar collapses with the chevron on its inside edge, which is worth doing on a laptop when you want the plan as big as possible. And the 2D / 3D button always names the mode you are going to, not the one you are in — if it says “Switch to 3D”, you are looking at the plan.

Pick a shape, or draw your own walls

Two ways in, and both end up in exactly the same editable plan.

From a template. The start page offers Single Wall, L, U, G and Single + Island. Choose one and you get a small dialog asking for each wall’s length and your ceiling height, with a Rotate button if the shape is mirrored from yours. Everything you type is in inches, and every wall stays adjustable afterwards — the template is a head start, not a commitment.

Drawing your own. Hit 🧱 Add Wall in the tool strip and a length bar appears. Type a length and press Enter to drop each wall, using the direction buttons — → Right ↓ Down ← Left ↑ Up — or the turn buttons ↺90 ↺45 180 straight ↻45 ↻90 to change direction as you go. There is an angle box in degrees for anything that is not a right angle, and holding Shift lets you draw at a free angle. Click Add Wall again — or press Esc — to finish.

Selecting a wall brings up its panel in the right sidebar, where you can retype its length and adjust the neighbours either side. Right-clicking a wall gives you ⓘ Property… — the sheet where you set its name, height, thickness, whether it is a normal wall or an island, which side the design runs on, whether it carries a bulkhead (and how deep), and how each end closes.

The catalog, and the one behaviour that confuses everybody

Open ▦ Catalog in the tool strip and you get a searchable, drill-down tree:

Two faster routes exist. The 🔍 search box on the canvas takes anything — window sink B24 BER36 — and the results are draggable straight onto the plan. And with a cabinet selected, the Quick-add panel appears: press a bare arrow key to choose the side (↑ above, ↓ below, ← left, → right), which also jumps the cursor into the SKU box so you can type the code and hit Enter.

Windows and doors work the same way — drag them onto a wall, then use the editor that appears to set width, height, height off the floor and the gap either side. Cut-outs let you type an exact width and height before you drag.

The mouse and trackpad rules worth learning once

• Left-drag on empty space is a marquee, not a pan — sweep a box to select several items at once.
• Panning has three gestures — a middle-button drag, two fingers on a trackpad, or the space bar held down while you drag. The wheel and a pinch both zoom. Full list in the box below.
• Ctrl (or ⌘) + click adds and removes items from a multi-selection.
• Alt + click repeatedly peels down through stacked items — the fastest way to grab something hiding under a wall cabinet. Clicking an already-selected wall cabinet that covers an appliance also drops to the appliance, and clicking again pops back up.
• Alt + arrow keys hop the selection to the next item in that direction — quicker than aiming at a crowded plan.
• Click a GAP number and type the gap you want. With an item selected on that wall, clicking the dimension asks for a width in inches and slides the item until the gap is exactly that.

The designer works out which device you are on from the way the scroll arrives, and a wheel mouse keeps zooming exactly as it always did. If it ever guesses wrong — a wheel that slides the plan instead of zooming, or a trackpad that zooms when you wanted to slide — pin it down by hand in ⚙ 2D Settings → Plan View → Pan & Zoom Input: Auto Mouse Trackpad. The choice is remembered in that browser.

For precise moves, open Move Object in the right sidebar: a direction pad for forward, back, left, right, up and down, and a Step box that accepts decimals, fractions or both — 1.5 11/16 1 11/16 all work. Below it, 📦 Pack gathers the selected items (or everything, if nothing is selected) into one group you can move and rotate together with ⟲ ⟳ and a degrees box.

Right-clicking a cabinet gives you the option a drag cannot: ✥ Move (click new spot) picks the item up and drops it wherever you click next — including onto a different wall. Right-click or Esc cancels.

Every button along the top of the plan

The design’s name sits at the left of the strip and reads — not saved — until you save it; click it to rename. The 🧰 handle at the far left expands and collapses the strip.

Inside 2D Settings are the controls most people never find and then cannot live without: Smart Snap and Point Snap with their own thresholds, a Corner Cab Magnet distance (turn it down when you want to park a corner cabinet just off the corner), SKU names in the top view instead of item numbers, the elevation detail level, and Elevation Auto-Switch — which makes the elevation follow whatever you select, and which you turn off when you want it to stay on one wall. Hover a setting’s name and a small animation shows you what it does.

The drawing your installer actually wants

The elevation is a straight-on view of one wall, and it is where you check heights, door faces and how a run reads. Turn it on with ▤ Elevation from either 2D or 3D; it docks below the plan and you can drag the divider to resize it.

• S / M switch between a single wall and several walls side by side.
• Each wall gets a name button. Right-click one to rename or delete that wall — the only place you can.
• Drag a cabinet horizontally to slide it along the wall, or vertically to raise or lower it; the axis locks once you commit to a direction. Hold Shift to ignore point snapping.
• Same mouse rules as the plan: left-drag marquees, middle-drag pans, Esc deselects.
• The detail level (in 2D Settings) goes from plain boxes to door and drawer faces, to the real door profile of the colour you picked, to a full hidden-line construction drawing.

The toolbar you have to go looking for

And there is a second twist: the toolbar has two halves that swap. With Edit 3D off you get the viewing tools; turn Edit 3D on and those are replaced by the editing tools. If a button you remember has vanished, that is why.

Photo (P) deserves its own note. The first press opens a small panel — brightness, countertop staging, and whether to stage the surroundings with a number of props. Press P again and it shoots immediately, which is the quick way once you have your settings. Finished photos land in 3D Photos.

Colours, counters, floors and finishes

The right sidebar in 3D is where the kitchen stops being grey. Each icon is a page:

One more thing worth knowing on the Molding page: the auto-generate toggles are a 3D preview only. The two ➕ Auto add buttons underneath are what create real mouldings — the kind that appear in the item list, in the elevation and in the quote.

Most of the power is in the context menus

If you only learn one habit, make it this one: right-click the thing you want to change. The menu is different for every kind of object, and it is where the detailed work happens.

• On a cabinet — rotate 90° or 45°, ⓘ Property, ✥ Move to a new spot, move or reset its label, put a countertop on it, add or remove crown and light rail, toggle the toe kick, add a 12″ cabinet on top, add a hood underneath, and delete. Side fillers and end panels appear here too, labelled with the real gap they will fill.
• On a sink base — a one-click width swap between the sink-base sizes, plus add or remove a modern sink and faucet.
• On a pantry — flip the short door to the top, and add trim sized to the cabinet’s height.
• On an appliance — rotate, add an end panel either side, add a cabinet on top, property, delete.
• On a wall — the property sheet: name, length, height, island or normal, which side the design runs on, bulkhead, and how each end closes.
• On a countertop edge — the edge type (○ double 1½″, △ single ¾″, c/c clean cut against a wall), its overhang, and on exposed side edges, a waterfall.
• On a countertop slab — add a sink cut-out (30×16) or a cooktop cut-out (29×20), then drag it along the edge or click any of its four numbers to type an exact dimension.
• On a bare wall in Edit 3D — ➕ Add Backsplash, then push each of its four edges in or out an inch at a time.
• On empty space — right-click is the universal cancel: it puts down a painter, abandons a pending Move, ends the wall-drawing tool and clears a half-finished measurement.

When two things sit on top of each other — a crown and a light rail are only a few pixels apart — the menu asks which one you meant first.

SW Design, next-step suggestions and voice

SW Design lays out a whole kitchen for you, and it asks before it guesses. It starts by asking which walls to build on — tick the ones that get cabinets — and then opens an anchors panel: you say where the stove or cooktop, the fridge, the sink, the dishwasher, a pantry or an island should go, either by clicking the spot on the plan or by picking a wall. None of them are mandatory; anything you leave out it simply leaves out, filling the rest of the wall with cabinets. Two preferences sit at the top: the wall-cabinet height (or Auto, taken from your ceiling), and a base-only switch that skips the uppers altogether. Then it generates up to four complete layouts for you to compare.

SStep is the smaller version: with a plan in progress it suggests the next cabinet — which SKU, which wall, how far along — and tells you why. A steps box lets it place several in a row, and it will ask you a question when the answer genuinely depends on how you cook.

🪄 Design Helper takes plain language, typed or spoken: “place BER36 here”. The trick is the anchor — hover the mouse over the spot in 3D first and the target pins itself, so you can take your time typing. Press F5 to talk instead. It lives inside Edit 3D, so turning it on turns Edit 3D on too.

The 📎 upload button beside it takes an existing kitchen plan — an image or a PDF — as a starting point.

Save, load, export and the quote

• Saving needs a Google sign-in. The first save asks for a project name and mints an ID and a share link, copied to your clipboard automatically. Every later save writes back to that same project.
• Save As always creates a new project, which is how you branch a design to try something without losing the original.
• Load opens the design library: folders you can create and drag designs into, a search box that takes a name or an ID, sorting, and a grid or list view. Hovering a name shows its thumbnail.
• Export lets you tick which sheets go in — elevation, top view, countertop drawing, a 3D photo, render photos, even pictures from your own computer — preview the page order, drag to reorder it, then save a PDF. Save Local works without signing in.
• Publish shares the design in the public community gallery. It saves first, so what people see is current.

The Quote page keeps a running count of what your design contains — wall cabinets, base cabinets, pantry, accessories, and the countertop area — with a box for a coupon code and a summary at the bottom. It updates as you design, so you always know roughly where a change lands before you commit to it.

The keyboard

You can bind your own shortcuts to most toolbar buttons in Settings. A few are reserved and cannot be reassigned: undo, redo, Esc, Delete, Backspace and O.

Apple Pencil: why it stops working, in the order worth checking

An iPad and an Apple Pencil are the nicest way to draw a room — you trace the walls the way you would on paper. So it is worth knowing what to do the day the Pencil goes half-dead in the middle of a design, because the two most common causes are not on anybody’s troubleshooting list: a film on the screen, and a tip that has quietly unscrewed itself.

The five standard checks

• 1. Charge it, and confirm it is charging. A Pencil that attaches magnetically to the flat side of the iPad should pop up a little charge card within a second or two — no card means no charge is going in. The first-generation Pencil charges from the port instead: cap off, plug it in (with the small adapter on a USB-C iPad).
• 2. Confirm it is actually paired. Settings › Apple Pencil should list it with a battery level. If it is not there, it is not connected — and check Bluetooth is on, because a Pencil is a Bluetooth device and Airplane Mode kills it.
• 3. Forget it and pair again. Settings › Bluetooth, tap the ⓘ beside Apple Pencil, Forget This Device, then attach or plug it in again. A Pencil that was last used on a different iPad always needs this — it only talks to one at a time.
• 4. Restart the iPad, then update iPadOS. Dull advice, and it genuinely fixes a Pencil that has gone unresponsive after a long session.
• 5. Make sure it is the right Pencil for that iPad. Generations are not interchangeable: the ones that pair by attaching to the magnetic side will never pair with an iPad that expects the plug-in kind, and the other way round. If it has never once worked on this iPad, suspect the model before anything else.

A film on the screen — or on the iPad’s side

A screen protector sits between the tip and the glass, and the iPad reads the Pencil through that gap. A thin, well-fitted one is fine. A thick tempered-glass, matte or “paper-feel” film is not always: the line can lag behind the tip or sit slightly beside it, light strokes stop registering, and the last inch near an edge or a corner goes dead. Privacy and anti-glare films are the worst offenders — some carry a metallic layer that interferes with the digitizer directly.

• Location-dependent failure is the giveaway. Works in the middle, dies at one corner — that is a lifted edge, a bubble or trapped dust under the film, not the Pencil.
• Test it properly: peel one corner of the protector back and draw on the bare glass underneath. If that patch behaves, you have your answer.
• Do not forget the side of the iPad. A thick case, a folio flap or a wrap-around skin can hold a magnetic Pencil a millimetre off its charging strip — it then refuses to charge and keeps unpairing. Take the case off and attach the Pencil to bare aluminium to check.
• Or a skin on the Pencil itself. Wraps and grips over the flat face block the same connector, and anything over the front section stops double-tap being felt.

The tip is not screwed tight

The tip is a screw-on, replaceable part, and writing pressure slowly backs it off — most people never think to check it because it still looks attached. A tip that is a fraction loose loses solid contact with the pressure sensor behind it, and the result reads exactly like a failing Pencil: strokes that arrive in bursts, lines that only appear if you press hard, pressure that jumps, taps that do not register at all.

• Unscrew it all the way, then screw it back finger-tight. Snug, not forced — and make sure it goes on straight, because a cross-threaded tip behaves identically to a loose one.
• Replace a worn tip. Tips are consumables. If the point has gone flat or grey, wobbles even when tight, or the metal core is showing through, fit a fresh one — they come in packs of four.
• A third-party stylus is not the same thing. No pressure, no palm rejection, and it will mark the canvas with the side of your hand. If your “Pencil” came with a charging cable and no pairing step, this is what you have.

Symptom → likely cause

In one line each: nothing anywhere is a flat battery or a lost pairing; dead only near an edge is the film; bursts and hard presses are a loose tip; a line that lags or lands offset is a thick film; refusing to charge is a case in the way; and palm marks mean it is not an Apple Pencil at all.

One thing you can stop worrying about: an Apple Pencil never needs calibrating. If someone tells you to calibrate it, they are describing a different stylus. And if the tip, the film and the pairing are all ruled out and it still misbehaves, that is the point to book it in — not before.

Fifteen things you would otherwise find by accident

• 1. The 3D toolbar is hidden — push the cursor into the top of the view, or click the ≡ TOOLS pill.
• 2. Edit 3D swaps the entire toolbar. Missing buttons are on the other half.
• 3. Hold two seconds to drag a cabinet in 3D — instantly if Edit 3D is on.
• 4. Middle-drag pans. Left-drag marquees. That one catches everybody.
• 5. Alt+click again and again to peel down through stacked items.
• 6. Click a gap number and type the gap you want — the selected item slides to make it exact.
• 7. P once for options, P twice to shoot.
• 8. Press O to open every door in the room — the fastest sanity check on door swings.
• 9. Right-click cancels anything you have armed.
• 10. Format Painter off repaints everything; on paints one cabinet.
• 11. Clicking a catalog row only adds something when a cabinet is already selected — otherwise drag it.
• 12. The Move step box takes fractions: 11/16 and 1 11/16 are both fine.
• 13. Right-click a countertop edge for its profile and overhang; right-click the slab to drop in a sink or cooktop cut-out.
• 14. Right-click a wall’s name button in the elevation to rename or delete that wall.
• 15. Ctrl+P opens Export. Ctrl+Shift+R wipes the design.