Cut in Millimeters, Buy in Feet

Walk into any cabinet shop and you'll see at least three measurement systems in active use at the same time:

• The cut list: probably in millimeters if the shop's serious about precision (1mm is the standard tolerance for cabinet parts).
• The plywood and sheet goods: sold in inches and feet (4'×8', 5'×5', 5'×10'). The supplier prints it in imperial because that's how the mill cuts it.
• The hardwood lumber: sold by the board foot, dimensions in inches. Sometimes by the metre if you're in Europe, the UK, or Canada.
• The trim and molding: sold in lineal feet or lineal metres depending on the supplier.
• The hardware (hinges, drawer slides): manufactured in mm if European, inches if North American — and they don't match.

Now the shop owner sits down to plan a job. The customer asked for cabinets at 600mm deep. The plywood comes from a yard that sells 4'×8' sheets. The drawer slides are 22-inch full-extension. The face frame stock is 8/4 hardwood by the board foot.

In a single project, you have parts in millimeters, stock sheets in feet, drawer slides in inches, and material costs in board feet. None of these convert to each other in a way that's clean enough to do in your head.

This isn't a hobbyist problem. It's the normal state of a working shop.

The vast majority of cut list and nesting tools have a single global unit setting buried in preferences. Pick one — millimeters, inches, feet — and that's the unit for everything in the project. Stock sheets, cut pieces, dimensions in exports, the works.

This is a leftover from how the tools were originally built. The math is easier internally if everything's stored in one unit. The UI is simpler if there's only one unit to display. The developer never ran a shop, so they never noticed the problem.

The pain hits you the moment you have to enter a 4-foot-wide sheet. You either:

1. Switch the whole project to imperial, then convert your 600mm cabinet depths to inches in your head (23.622 inches — try entering that accurately into a spreadsheet).
2. Stay in metric and convert 4 feet to 1219.2mm yourself before typing it in. Then you do the same calculation again next week for the next job. And the week after.
3. Just round and accept the 1-2mm of drift. Eventually a part comes out short and you redo it.

Or — more common in real shops — the spreadsheet has a mix of mm, inches, feet, and somebody is doing math in their head all day long. The cost is mistakes that don't show up until cutting.

EZNESTING handles this with three layers of unit settings, in decreasing scope:

1. Project default. Set once when you create a project. Imperial or metric. This affects nothing on its own — it's just the fallback when you don't override anything else.

2. Section default. Each section of your project (Stock Sheets, Cut Pieces, Stock Lengths, Linear Pieces) has its own unit. Set it from the dropdown in the section header.

• Cutting cabinet parts in millimeters? Set the Cut Pieces section to mm.
• Buying 4'×8' plywood? Set the Stock Sheets section to inches or feet.

You can mix them freely. The optimizer doesn't care — it converts to mm internally and back out in whatever unit you specified per section.

3. Per-row override. If a single row needs to be in a different unit than the rest of its section, click the unit on that row and pick a different one. The other rows in the section stay as they were.

• 90% of your hardwood stock is in board feet, but one piece you bought in Europe is in metres? Override that one row.
• All your cut pieces are in mm, but a custom drawer slide cutout is spec'd in inches? Override that one row.

This is invisible until you need it. Most projects, you'll set the section defaults once and never touch a per-row unit. But when reality demands it, the option's there.

A cabinetmaker is building a kitchen. Here's how the project's units look:

• Project default: imperial (the shop is in Texas, the customer thinks in feet).
• Stock Sheets section: set to inches. The supplier sells 4'×8', 5'×5', and 5'×10' plywood — all in inches.
• Cut Pieces section: set to mm. The cabinet design is metric-spec'd, side panels are 580mm tall, bottoms are 568mm wide, etc. Far easier to enter and cross-check.
• Stock Lengths section: set to feet. The face frame stock is bought as 8/4 hardwood by the board foot, lengths in feet.
• One row in Cut Pieces is overridden to inches: a quirky custom appliance panel the customer measured in inches and never converted.

The optimizer takes all of this, converts internally to mm, runs the nest, and outputs the layout. Each result row displays in the same unit the input was in. The export PDF respects the per-section units too.

No conversion math anywhere. The shop just enters numbers in the units they were given.

A sign maker is producing channel letters and a backlit cabinet. The units:

• Project default: metric (the company is Canadian).
• Stock Sheets section: set to inches. The aluminum composite material (ACM) comes in 4'×8' and 4'×10', priced in feet.
• Cut Pieces section: set to mm. Letters are designed in vector software using mm.
• Stock Lengths section: set to feet. The trim cap (the U-shaped channel around each letter) is sold in 10-foot rolls.
• Linear Pieces section: set to mm. The needed lengths per letter perimeter are computed in mm by the design software.

The optimizer runs across all of them simultaneously — sheet nesting for the ACM, linear packing for the trim cap — and outputs cut layouts that match how the shop will execute. Sheets are cut on a CNC router (inches). Trim cap is cut by hand on a chop saw (mm marks visible on the metric side of the tape).

Without per-section units, the shop would either be doing trig in their head all day or making mistakes from the conversions.

In any EZNESTING project, you'll see a small unit dropdown in the top-right of each section header. Click it and pick the unit for that section. Five options:

• mm (millimeters)
• cm (centimeters)
• m (metres)
• in (inches)
• ft (feet)

That sets the section default — the unit new rows will use when you add them.

To override a single row's unit, click the unit indicator inside that row (it's the small text after the number) and pick a different one. The dimensions update to display in the new unit; the underlying mm value stays the same.

There's no "global setting" to bury this. You set what you need where you need it. Defaults flow down: row uses section default unless overridden; section uses project default unless overridden.

Hover the info icon next to each section header for a one-line reminder of how the unit setting works.

EZNESTING Pro adds an inventory section where you can track stock prices. Currency works similarly: pick one in your Company Profile (USD, CAD, AUD, EUR, GBP, JPY, INR, and others), and all prices in the app display with that symbol.

Critically: there are no currency conversions anywhere in EZNESTING. The number you enter is the number stored and the number displayed. If you set the currency to EUR and enter "10.00", the system shows "€10.00" — it doesn't try to convert USD to EUR or anything like that.

Why no conversion? Two reasons:

1. Exchange rates move daily. A stored "10 USD" auto-converted to euros today might be wrong tomorrow. Worse, your historical cost data drifts.
2. You bought the material in a specific currency. That's what it cost. Conversion is a separate analysis your accountant runs, not something embedded in inventory.

Same philosophy as the units: respect the data the user enters. Display in the unit they picked. Never silently transform the value behind their back.

EZNESTING is free to use with no signup for basic optimization. Sign up for an account to save your projects to the cloud and access multi-unit projects across devices.

For shops that need inventory tracking, project lifecycle, and branded quotes, the [Pro plan](/pricing) is $19.99/month and uses the same multi-unit system across stock, cut pieces, and inventory.

The point of all this isn't unit conversion as a feature. It's that you shouldn't have to think about units when you're planning a job. Enter what you were told in the unit you were told it in. Let the software handle the math.