This is a bit hacky.

I've worked in IT all my life, and we have a saying that Excel is the wrong tool for every job, because it is so often misused for doing the strangest of tasks.

It seems you have decided to embrace Excel and make it the only tool for every job!

After having produced reasonable external planning elevations in Excel it became apparent (a bit too late) just how horrendously complicated the task of producing a series of vertical sections within Excel would be.

Seriously, I can't imagine trying to do plans in Excel My brain hurts even thinking about it.

but it'll be a bloody mess

As you are retired and abusing a very old version of Excel, is it fair to say that you are reluctant to learn new software? At the end of the day, use what works for you, but...

I do have to put my IT lecturing hat on for a moment though, and wag my finger at using such old, outdated applications

General support for Office 2007 ended in 2012. That is a more than a decade of potential exposure with zero security updates.

If you insist on using a spreadsheet tool to create plans

perhaps look into the free LibreOffice suite of applications. It will install on Windows, and it operates much like Excel.

... you can draw into the spreadsheet there too.

You are playing Russian Roulette

Another workaround could be to split the walls, setting the separation of walls in front of the camera.

sjb007 wrote:

I hope you are not referring to my image - the local planning officer said they are the basis for an entirely adequate application.

sjb007 wrote:

I've spent that last few days taking a relatively deep dive into Sweet Home 3D.

sjb007 wrote:

That was enjoyable - Sweet Home 3D is currently purring along on this Intel(R) Core(TM)i5-3320M CPU @2.60GHZ 4GB RAM and Win7 pro is, pretty much, solid as a rock.

sjb007 wrote:

If you imagine M_S is not harvesting all that ou_tloo_kdo_tcom info for, godonlyknows what, well... in any case, I haven't, er, wasted, a penny on a new machine for 11 years. Some heavy duty photogrammetry calculations could cause me to update somewhat if I ever choose to look into that fascinating topic more thoroughly but, equally, if that was the case I might just look into M_S Azure (or similar) in a bit more detail and rent out a host of remote CPU's for as short a time as possible

sjb007 wrote:

As it is, i'd prefer to get everything done in Sweet Home 3D but suspect that will not happen. I'd also like not to have to put the effort into learning FREECAD (which I imagine could do it all) but, if possible, do not wish to expend the energy to do that.

sjb007 wrote:

We all are - TCP/IP encapsulation (and/or whatever follows) makes that so. I'm amazed everytime I login to online banking and there's still a positive balance.

In summary - that "Excel is the wrong tool for every job" is patently untrue. I've used it to great effect over several decades even though the last version of VB / VBA was released in March 2017.

All of what you said was very enjoyable though - so thanks for the comment(s)

I wasn't insulting the end result, more pointing out that it will be painful. A simple example... In Excel you have all your drawn elements on the top of the spreadsheet as just one big collection of drawn objects.

Your screenshot looks good

then Excels abilities as a technical drawing tool.

Getting them all onto a standard A2 at proper 1:50 scale with a proper info block is a lot more work and requires other software.

This is not about the relative power of your PC, or Microsoft having God mode on your PC. This is about old unsupported software having unpatched vulnerabilities that malicious 3rd parties can exploit. They want three things from you:

• your money,
  
• your personal info (that they can sell for money)
  
• your internet (that they can use to attack other systems for even more money)
  

On an application difficulty rating of 1-10 with SH3D being a 3 or 4, FreeCAD I'd put at a 10. Learning to use it to create final plans would be a huge time sink.

But then, you are retired

You must have one of these

it is a bit of hyperbole, but I've seen people use Excel for managing a large project instead of MS Project when they already had access to the real thing! As dates moved they would sit in meetings painstakingly colouring in the cells of their gantt chart styled spreadsheet as everyone else waited... And don't get me started on "critical" business processes being coded up in Excel and saved on that one "computer genius" persons local hard drive...