Most students jump straight to punching shear when designing a raft or combined footing — and skip the one step that actually decides whether the design works: sizing the footing against the load resultant. In this video, I break down why raft foundation geometry comes before depth, walk through a full worked example (IS 456:2000, Clause 31.6), and show the Excel toolkit I built to do it — for 2, 3, 4, 6, and 9-column layouts.