So, I’ve been talking Cad recently, after doing a flip-flop and reverting back from DraftSight to a new license of AutoCad Lt.
In what appears to be a battle to get more users, Draft Sight has stepped up their marketing by adding value to their product, and put out a ‘Getting Started Guide’ for free, via their website.
So if you were looking to try using Cad for the first or maybe second time, Dassault Systemes, makers of DraftSight, have just made it that little bit easier.
AutoCad, by contrast, still uses a web-based help tool accessed from within the program, augmented by the tonnes of user forums that answer specific user questions, both hosted on their own site and found on many others. Not to mention many actual paper publications written on the topic over the years.
I taught myself AutoCad on-the-job in the early 00’s, (admittedly after a couple of long-forgotten lessons at uni, and of course having relative proficiency in ArchiCad learned at my previous employers) and even then it was easy to Google an issue to figure out how to make the thing do as was required. Now of course there are YouTube videos and online tutorials to help out, which show you exactly how to performs certain tasks, and offer useful tips and tricks. Very handy if you’ve just, say, updated your copy of Cad, and would like to find out what the new tools are. Especially handy if said new tools replace a whole bunch of hit-and-miss calculations that you used to have to perform in your head and on the page to get a design to work ‘just so’.