Start here: paste your calls in. Type or paste the metes and bounds into the box on the left and press Plot calls. Everything else on the page is optional. You can paste the calls straight out of the deed, like THENCE South 52 degrees 23 minutes 17 seconds East 653.92 feet, and it will read them. Degrees can be written with symbols, words or hyphens, half and quarter degrees work, and varas are converted.

Copying out of another program. Copy the calls out of Net Deed Plotter, Sandy Knoll or whatever you plot in and paste them here. If the plat you copy from numbers each course down the side, a 1, 2, 3, 4 in front of every call, that is fine; the tool strips the leading line numbers for you. You can also paste a whole page out of a title report or a deed and it will pick the courses out of the surrounding words. One course per line reads the cleanest.

No deed handy? Start from the county parcel. Under Import parcel from county, pick the county, enter the parcel number and press Import parcel. The parcel and its neighbors drop in as a background you can trace over. From there you have three ways to make a tract: paste a deed and it lands on the parcel, press Give M&B for loaded parcel to turn the parcel's own outline into metes and bounds in one click, or press Draw tract and click the corners by hand. Any of the three fills in the calls below and lets you download or open the result in the CAD tool. Ohio is one statewide service (put the county first, e.g. Carroll 310001627000); Texas is by county. Parcel outlines follow the county appraisal map, which is not survey‑accurate, so always check them against the deed.

The calls are only as good as the text you feed it. This reads the words you paste; it does not fix them. Sloppy OCR (a 5 read as an S, a dropped digit, two courses run together) plots wrong, and a wrong digit can still close, so it will not always warn you. If you are working from a scanned or photographed deed, transcribe it into clean metes-and-bounds text first, one course per line, and paste that in rather than raw OCR. Always check the converted calls under the plot against the instrument before you trust the acreage.

More than one tract. Paste them one after another and label each, as Tract One, Tract Two (160 ac) or Parcel 2, or start each new tract with @0. Either way the tool splits them and totals the acreage. In the schedule under the map each tract shows its plotted Acres, the Deed acreage pulled from its name, and an Off by figure. Off by is the plotted acreage minus the deed acreage, how far your plot landed from what the deed calls for. Close to zero means the calls plotted clean. A large number usually means a call was mistyped or misread. Green is within half a percent, red is worth another look.

Notes on corners and lines. Anything the deed says about a corner or a line (an adjoiner, an easement, a found monument, a volume and page) goes in parentheses at the end of that call, and it rides right along with the calls: N59.5300E 5572.22 (found 1/2 inch iron rod at a fence corner), or N30.3000W 844.44 (to the corner of the A. B. Welch tract, 145-980). Turn on the Corner notes button and every call that carries a note gets a small tag on the plat, C1, C2, C3… for the corners and L1, L2, L3… for the lines, numbered in the order they come. On the printed sheet each note prints keyed to its tag, like (C1: found 1/2 inch iron rod at a fence corner), so the tag on the map and the note in the calls read together. Corner notes are off by default, so the plat stays clean until you want the detail, and only the calls you note ever get a tag.

Working with the plot on screen. A tool button above the map turns navy when it is on, and a couple, Move tract and Draw tract, open extra options just under the tool row while they are active. A hand cursor means you can drag: drag a tract to move it, drag the whole view with Move map, or drag the plot onto the parcels with Move all tracts. While Move tract is on, tick the snap boxes to click a tract against a neighboring tract or the county parcel lines and slide it into place. With Move tract on you can also move the labels themselves: hover over a tract number or a label box and the cursor changes, then drag it wherever you want it and a thin leader line ties it back to its tract. In the schedule below the map, drag a row by its number to re-order the tracts, and double-click a tract’s name to rename it (up to 75 characters, and the name carries into every export). Two buttons add survey detail when you want it: POB marks each tract’s point of beginning with an arrow showing the direction the calls run, and Corner notes tags the described corners and lines as above.

Sharing a map with someone. Share map saves the whole plot, the imported parcel and every tract right where you have them moved and rotated, as a small .d2g file in your Downloads named after your title. Email or text that file to anyone. They go to this site, click Open d2g file, and pick the file, and it opens exactly as you had it. Opening a shared map pulls the county parcel fresh, so whoever opens it needs to be online, the same as when you imported it. The .d2g file opens only in this tool, it is not a document, so double-clicking it just shows the raw text.

It works as a plain deed plotter. Paste calls with no coordinates at all and you still get the drawing, the closure, the acreage, the deed comparison, the less and except arithmetic and a printable sheet. Coordinates only decide where the tract sits on the earth. The drawing, the closure, the acreage and the sheet all work without them.

Placing it without coordinates. The shapefile is still useful unplaced: drop it into ArcGIS Pro, then Edit, Modify Features, Move and drag it onto the parcels, with Rotate if the bearings run off a different north. Neither changes the shape or the acreage. The KMZ is the one export that needs a real location, because Google Earth has nowhere to put a tract with no latitude and longitude and no way to nudge it afterwards, so the tool tells you rather than dropping it in the wrong county. The easiest way to give it a location is to import the county parcel above, or to add one beginning coordinate as described next.

Where to get the coordinates. The easiest way is not to enter one at all. Import the county parcel in Step 2 above and your deed drops into that parcel’s area, already carrying coordinates, so there is nothing to look up. It lands in the area, not exactly on the parcel. A deed’s bearings run off whatever north the original survey tied to, true or magnetic, usually a degree or two off the map, and the appraisal outline is not survey‑accurate either, so you will often drag the tract a little and give it a small Rotate to seat it on the parcel. Moving and rotating only shift the picture; the coordinates ride along with it. Once it is placed you can download it or open it in the CAD tool, Google Earth or ArcGIS, sitting where you put it. Reach for the county parcel first whenever it is available. When it is not, pull a beginning coordinate off Google Maps: open it in a browser, find the beginning corner, and right-click it. The latitude and longitude sit at the top of the little menu that opens, and clicking them copies them. Paste that into the box above on its own line, above that tract’s calls, and press Plot calls.

The tool works out which UTM zone the point falls in and sets Coordinate system to match, so you never have to know what zone you are in. It tells you when it does.

It takes the numbers in whatever shape they arrive. Paste any of these and it reads them:

• 35.4676, -97.5164 is what Google Maps copies.
• -97.5164, 35.4676 is longitude first, the order KML writes.
• 35°28'03"N, 97°30'59"W is degrees, minutes and seconds.
• 14 S 0634611, 3925911 is the UTM readout along the bottom of Google Earth.
• e634611 n3925911 is what this tool has always used.
• A placemark copied out of Google Earth and pasted in whole. It finds the coordinates inside it.

In Google Earth the same thing works: put a placemark on the corner, open its properties and copy the latitude and longitude out, or just copy the placemark itself and paste the lot in.

Use the historical imagery. Google Earth Pro keeps decades of older aerials, and the clock icon in the toolbar opens a time slider across the top of the view. Drag it back and the same ground redraws as it looked in the 1990s, the 1980s, sometimes the 1930s or 40s. Old deeds tie their corners to things that are long gone on today's photo: a fence line, a hedge row, a lane, a barn, an old road bed, a pond, the edge of a field, a line of trees left along a property line. Those features are usually still there on an older frame. Slide the imagery back until the call makes sense, drop a placemark where the old fence corner or road intersection sits, and read its latitude and longitude. Once your KMZ is loaded you can slide the years back and forth under it and watch your deed lines fall onto the old fence and turn rows.

The deed usually tells you where to start: beginning calls tie to a section corner, a road intersection, a creek or a fence line. Get within a few feet of the corner and the tract plots in place. Google reads in WGS84 and this tool works in NAD83, which differ by only a metre or two across the continental US.

Coordinates also turn up in other places. Modern unit plats and survey plats often publish coordinates for well locations or corners; if yours does, use them, and note which datum, because NAD 27 and NAD 83 sit about 200 metres apart. If the tract next door is already plotted, you can start this one from the corner they share using a tie call.

Once you have the corner, right-click it, paste, plot, download the KMZ and open it in Google Earth. The tract sits on the aerial with the imagery, the historical imagery and the measuring tools already there.

Name your tracts and it does the arithmetic. Start a tract with @0 and a name:

• @0 TRACT ONE 108.5 AC 53-34. The acreage in the name is read as the deed acreage, and the table shows how far the plot is off it. Green means within half a percent, red means something is wrong with a call.
• @0 L&E 40.49 AC PER 79-630. Anything with L&E, LESS, EXCEPT or SAVE AND in the name is treated as a less and except, and so is any tract that plots inside another one, whatever it is called. A name with ROW, R/W or right of way becomes a right-of-way, and unit makes it a unit.
• Exceptions draw in red, show which tract they fall in, and the totals come out as gross, less and except, and leaving herein. Tick or untick the box in the table to change any of it.
• The dropdown stays on Keep as their own polygons by default, which exports the parent and each exception as separate shapes. Switch to Punch out of the parent only if you want the parent cut into a donut with the exception removed; the exceptions then go to a second shapefile in the same zip. Punching changes what the parent exports as, the shape becomes the donut and the acreage becomes the net after the exception, so the exported parent no longer matches the gross tract its own deed describes. Your typed calls are not changed either way.

The lines it reads

• N59.5300E 5572.22 is a call: bearing then distance in feet. North 59 degrees, 53 minutes, 00 seconds East. Plain ones like s58w and n90e work too.
• S29.0000E 456.25v has a v on the end, which means varas.
• curve left radius 1397.39 chord s57.4020e 339.73 draws as a real curve, not a straight chord.
• e737192.141m n3409732.601m is where the tract sits on the map. Latitude and longitude, degrees-minutes-seconds and Google Earth's UTM readout all work on this line too; see Where to get the coordinates above. A (Moved) on the end is ignored.
• /N51.0639W 4273.40 is a tie call, with the slash. It walks to the beginning point without drawing boundary.

Read the closure column. That is how far the last call misses the starting corner. Under a foot is good. A hundred feet usually means a call was mistyped or misread, and the acreage will be off by a similar margin. If the tool says 24 acres and the deed says 28.7, go back and find the bad call.

Why it may sit a few feet off the parcels. Deed distances are measured along the ground. Map coordinate systems are flat grids laid over a curved earth. Over a long tract the two disagree by a few feet per thousand.

Why a tract sometimes needs a small rotation. A deed's bearings are measured from whatever north the original surveyor tied to, usually a degree or two off the map's north. The shape plots correctly and the distances and acreage are right, but the whole tract sits at a slight angle to the county parcel. Drag the tract onto the parcel, then use Rotate to spin it about its center until the corners line up. The rotation turns the picture only. It does not change your calls, your distances or your acreage, and the calls you copy out are exactly what you entered.

The kinds of north. A bearing is measured from some north, and there is more than one. True north points to the earth’s axis, the north pole. Magnetic north is where a compass needle points; it sits off true north by an amount called the declination, which depends on where you are and drifts over the years. Grid north is the north of the map’s coordinate system, UTM or State Plane, and it also runs a little off true north depending on where you fall in the zone. An old deed surveyed with a compass is tied to the magnetic north of its day. A newer one may be tied to true north, to a grid, to an assumed meridian, or to a prior survey. When that basis is not the same as the map’s grid north, the tract plots at a slight angle, and that angle is what you are taking out with Rotate.

How much rotation is normal. The spin is the gap between the north the deed’s bearings used and the map’s grid north, and it comes from two things: grid convergence, which runs up to a degree or two across Texas and Oklahoma, and the survey’s basis, since a deed run on a magnetic compass is tied to the magnetic north of its day, a few degrees off true north. A deed on true north or a grid needs only the convergence, about a degree or two; an old magnetic survey needs a few degrees more, into the four to six range. Up to about half a dozen degrees is ordinary. Past eight or ten, check the calls: a bearing in the wrong quadrant (an N read as S, or an E as W), a transposed figure, a wrong beginning corner, or the wrong tract.