Paste your calls in. Copy them out of Net Deed Plotter, Sandy Knoll or whatever you plot in. You can also paste the metes and bounds straight out of the deed — THENCE South 52 degrees 23 minutes 17 seconds East 653.92 feet and the like — and it will read them. Degrees can be written with symbols, words or hyphens, and half and quarter degrees work. Varas are converted.

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, run it through a good AI first and have it pull out clean metes-and-bounds text — Claude (the one that built this) does this well: give it the deed image or PDF and ask for the courses one per line, then paste that here. 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 — Tract One, Tract Two (160 ac), Parcel 2 — or start each new tract with @0. Either way the tool splits them and totals the acreage, and if a tract's name carries its deed acreage it fills in the Off by column.

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 (along a road easement, 145-980). 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 — and the full text is listed under the plat and on the printed sheet. Only the calls you note get a tag, so the rest of the drawing stays clean; the Corner notes button hides them if you want.

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 it sits, not whether it works.

Without coordinates, the shapefile still works but the KMZ cannot. A shapefile can be picked up and moved once it is in ArcGIS, so an unplaced one is perfectly useful — add it, then Edit, Modify Features, Move, and drag it onto the parcels, with Rotate if the bearings run off a different north. Google Earth is different: a KMZ has to carry latitude and longitude and there is no way to nudge it afterwards, so the tool will stop you rather than drop your tract in the wrong county.

It works as a plain deed plotter too. Paste calls with no coordinates and you still get closure, acreage, the deed comparison, a plat sheet and a shapefile. The only thing you cannot do without coordinates is the KMZ — Google Earth has nowhere to put a tract that has no latitude and longitude, and unlike ArcGIS there is no way to drag it into place afterwards. The tool will tell you rather than export something wrong.

You do not need coordinates. If you have already lined the tract up on a map, include the lines that start with e and n. If you haven't, paste the calls anyway. You still get a proper shapefile with the right shape, size and acreage — it just isn't in the right place yet. Add it in ArcGIS Pro, then Edit, Modify Features, Move and drag it onto the parcels. Rotate if the deed bearings run off a different north than the map. Neither changes the shape or the acreage.

Where to get the coordinates. The quickest way needs nothing installed and no settings changed. Open Google Maps in a browser, find the beginning corner, and right-click it. The latitude and longitude are at the top of the little menu that opens — click them and they are copied. Paste that straight into the box above on its own line, above that tract’s calls, and press Plot calls. That is the whole job.

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 — what Google Maps copies.
• -97.5164, 35.4676 — longitude first, the order KML writes.
• 35°28'03"N, 97°30'59"W — degrees, minutes and seconds.
• 14 S 0634611, 3925911 — the UTM readout along the bottom of Google Earth.
• e634611 n3925911 — 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. Google Earth is worth the download for the historical imagery — old fence lines and turn rows on a twenty-year-old aerial will often show you a corner that is invisible today.

Finding the corner is the real work, and the deed usually tells you how: beginning calls tie to a section corner, a road intersection, a creek or a fence line. Get within a few feet of it and the tract lands where it belongs. Google reads in WGS84 and this tool works in NAD83, about a metre apart in this part of the country — nothing next to how closely you picked the corner.

The numbers turn up in a couple of other places worth knowing. 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. And if you have already plotted a tract that shares a corner with this one, seat the new tract on the corner you already know and walk in from it with a tie call.

Then the whole loop is free: right-click the corner, paste, plot, download the KMZ and open it in Google Earth. Your tract is on the aerial with the imagery, the historical imagery and the measuring tools already there. That is the easy way to see whether the lines fall where the deed says they do.

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. So is any tract that simply plots inside another one, whatever it's called.
• 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.
• Set the dropdown to Punch out of the parent and the parent becomes a proper donut with the exception cut out of it, and the exceptions go to a second shapefile in the same zip. That is a nuisance in most plotting software and it is one click here.

The lines it reads

• N59.5300E 5572.22 — 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 — a v on the end 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 — 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 — a tie call, with the slash. Walks to the beginning point without drawing boundary.

Getting it into ArcGIS Pro

• Unzip everything into one folder and keep the files together. The .shp, .shx, .dbf and .prj are one thing as far as ArcGIS is concerned and it will not open without all four.
• Drag the .shp onto your map.
• If it lands somewhere absurd, the coordinate system is wrong. Fix it with Define Projection, which corrects the label. Do not use Project — that moves the data.

Don't recalculate the acreage. The ACRES column comes from the deed distances, which is the acreage the instrument calls for. Calculate Geometry would give you the acreage of the map projection instead, about a tenth of a percent high. Put that in a new column if you want to compare.

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, a call is wrong, not the plot.

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. That is the map, not the deed.