When cutting panels out of a sheet of plywood or other sheet goods I have always drawn everything up in AutoCAD and arranged things for optimizing the panel usage. This got me thinking there must be some tools out there on the web for optimizing panel usage. I did a quick google search and found this: http://cutlistoptimizer.com/

Seems to work well. It doesn't always arrange them the way I would cut them from the plywood given I might want my waste pieces optimized in a different size, but for those of you who don't use CAD or other cut list optimizing software, this seems to be a pretty cool tool. It shows all dimensions, allows you to include saw kerf, and also lets you label everything... cool tool... so thought I would pass it along.

Here's an example of how I arranged my panel vs how the tool did.

My layout:
cutlist1.png

custlistoptimizer.com layout:
custlist2.png