Sections and Layout
Every Plan placed in a Store Plan becomes a square_foot Section: a rotatable block on the topdown canvas that draws the Plan's aisles and surfaces as seen from above. Laying out a store means adding sections and then positioning and rotating them to match the real floor.
Adding Plans
Plans are added to the open Store Plan in any of these ways:
- The Add Plans button at the top of the Store Plan panel.
- Insert > shelves Plan into Store Plan.
- Right-clicking empty canvas and choosing add_box Insert Plan. The new section is placed where you right-clicked.
Each of these opens a file picker limited to Plan and Store Plan files. Select one and click Add to Store Plan.
The same Plan may be added more than once -- a checkout endcap that appears four times on the floor is one Plan file placed as four sections.
Moving and Rotating Sections
Sections are dragged with the mouse like any other object on the canvas. Selecting a section also shows a rotation handle, so a run of shelving can be set at whatever angle the real store uses. Rotation is free-form -- sections are not restricted to right angles.
A section's outline is sized to the Plan it references. If that Plan later grows or shrinks -- an aisle is added, a bay is removed -- the section resizes to match the next time the Store Plan is opened.
Section Names
With Section Names checked in the Store Plan panel, each section is labelled on the canvas with its file type icon and the name of the Plan it references. Unchecking it hides every label at once, which is useful for screenshots and for dense layouts.
When the same Plan appears more than once at the same level of the Store Plan, each occurrence gets a number appended to its label -- Endcap, Endcap (2), Endcap (3) and so on. The numbers are assigned from the top-left of the layout to the bottom-right, so they stay predictable, and they appear only where duplicates exist.
Nested Store Plans
A Store Plan can be added to another Store Plan exactly as a Plan can. The nested Store Plan's own sections are expanded in place, and rotations compound: rotating the outer section turns everything inside it as a unit.
This is how a repeated block of the store -- a full grocery aisle, a department, a standard store format -- gets built once and reused. Editing the nested Store Plan updates every layout that includes it.
Opening the Plan Behind a Section
Fixtures and products are edited in the Plan itself, never in the Store Plan. To get there:
- Right-click a section and choose folder_open Open Plan.
- Right-click an individual aisle within a section and choose folder_open Open Planogram.
- Click the Plan's entry in the Current Plans tree.
- Right-click a fixture in 3d_rotation 3D and view it in 2D -- see Analysis and 3D.
Opening a Plan this way remembers the Store Plan you came from, so after saving your changes you are returned to the store layout rather than left in the individual Plan. The Store Plan panel stays available throughout, letting you move between Plans in the store without going back through File > Open.
Dimensions
Dimension lines in a Store Plan are drawn per aisle rather than per section, so you can read the real footprint of each run of fixtures instead of the bounding box of the file that contains it.
