Every new SketchUp release contains at least one modeling tool that’s guaranteed to save you a ton of time and effort. SketchUp Pro 8 contains five.
The all-new Solid Tools let you perform additive and subtractive modeling tasks (some folks call them Boolean operations) on subsets of your geometry. It’s really not as complicated as it sounds; basically, you use the Solid Tools to generate forms using other forms in your models. You do so by adding them together, subtracting one from the other, and finding the areas that they have in common. Plenty of 3D forms are much easier to make this way – you’ll find uses for them all over the place.