It could be argued that we have the greatest concentration of premises planners in the world - people who are trying to figure out how to fit the furniture into a new flat; people who are sketching layouts of new offices; and let us not forget those lucky ones who are designing new homes in places far away.

Gone is the need for the pencil and ruler, and the inevitable eraser. No more does one have to struggle with meticulously sketching a layout to scale, only to discover that walls, fences and passages do not meet as they should, due to what appeared to bea tiny error in judgement.

With HomePlan you can spend countless hours planning, designing, sketching and measuring.

It really does not matter what sort of layout you want, HomePlan can help you get your rough ideas into something understandable.

Not only that, but your drawings may be printed out to scale on any dot matrix or laser printer.

Before every draftsman in the territory downs his pencil and rushes to pick up a copy, let me stress that HomePlan will never replace you.

Nor does it compete with professional engineering design packages. It is a simple tool, effective as a sketch pad, not for the architect or the builder.

HomePlan is intended for the clumsy characters like me who have real trouble drawing a straight line, but who are overflowing with ideas and novel approaches.

Anyone who has played around with little pieces of paper which are roughly shaped as bird's eye views of miniature office furniture pieces will know exactly what I mean.

The program includes an automatic dimensioning facility and square footage can be easily calculated.

Watch out, avaricious landlords and over-enthusiastic real estate agents, now your prospective customers can check your numbers.

One small rent adjustment as a result could pay the cost of the entire PC, let alone the software.

It is true that there are dozens of drawing packages available, albeit at hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

But in my experience generalised packages are not really what the non-professional PC user wants.

For example, it is one thing to buy the latest and greatest version of a complex spreadsheet package, but it is another thing entirely to make it do something practical and useful for you, without spending hours or days learning about intricacies you will probably never use or need.

In line with that principle, Mr Herndon opens up his easy-to-follow manual with: ''HomePlan was written because I couldn't find a way to do these things without using a huge program and two hours of manual reading.'' The manual, which comes with the shareware version, is a simple document file which may be browsed or printed at the will of the user.

''This manual is meant to be a reference manual not a constant companion,'' he says in the manual.

''I advise you to load the program and start to draw a plan. Select the first option from the main menu, press F1 to see a list of commands and ESC to make the list go away. Frequent use of F1, Undo and Del will fix any mistakes.'' It is that easy.

One excellent feature in my mind is that the program is completely run from the keyboard, neither a mouse nor Windows is required.

Anything which reduces the complexity and cost of PC operation is a welcome change.

The entire HomePlan package consumes less than 150K of disk space, so unlike the mammoth generalised packages, this useful little system hardly makes a dent in your disk space and can easily be run from a low density floppy.

HomePlan is yet another example of the money-saving software which can be found on bulletin board systems (BBS) here and around the world.

Before you lose heart in your PC purchase, connect to a BBS and have a browse through the software libraries.

I would be surprised if you cannot find something that attracts your interest and avoids your PC gathering dust.