Visio I have used since win3. It was originally popular for their "save as" export formats making it extremely useful aside from it's mechanical & electrical "drop & drag format".
I customize my own tube library that works well. I am too a schematic dramatic. If I can't see whats going on in the first 5 seconds, I redraw it until I can with much better notations with title blocks, fasteners, all in the symbol library. I can knock out a nice looking drawing is much less time with Visio.
Microsoft bought it from some German company many years ago, but it still is a very powerful drawing package that I prefer over any other mainly because it's stripped down drawing SW with not much in the "extension" department. Runs well always.
I customize my own tube library that works well. I am too a schematic dramatic. If I can't see whats going on in the first 5 seconds, I redraw it until I can with much better notations with title blocks, fasteners, all in the symbol library. I can knock out a nice looking drawing is much less time with Visio.
Microsoft bought it from some German company many years ago, but it still is a very powerful drawing package that I prefer over any other mainly because it's stripped down drawing SW with not much in the "extension" department. Runs well always.
I thought visio was a nightmare, when I tired using it. It fails badly with its logic of where things can auto-snap (connect components and wires), and how you select and move things, etc. It looks good, and has great potential, but it is not easy or intuitive to use. (it's 100x easier to draw a circuit in ltspice)
Autocad is awesome! It's great for designing anything 🙂. You can find symbol libraries for standard cad, or now they have a product specifically for electrical engineering. You can get it for free if you have a university email address.
Autocad is awesome! It's great for designing anything 🙂. You can find symbol libraries for standard cad, or now they have a product specifically for electrical engineering. You can get it for free if you have a university email address.
Very powerful. Almost an industry standard in North America.
A pretty crude UI thou.
dave
True.. I found it to be the polar opposite of Visio in that respect. It works very well, and if you know how to use it, it's super fast and easy. But you're right, for the beginner who doesn't know its commands, you're basically looking at a blank slate. (or crosshairs and a command line)
It just takes a little cheat sheet of commands to get you started, though. The command line is what makes it so great.. One hand on the mouse, one one the keyboard, and you're flying.
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I sell CAD software and the biggest problem I get is where people have used something else previously and then they try to migrate to a new CAD package.
They expect both programs to work the same and they rarely do.
CAD requires a lot of special key presses peculiar to each function.
Quite often this is based on function keys which basically are meaningless without a legend.
For a long well i had lots of architectural clients. Except for a couple clients (ArchiCAD, and Archetrion), these were all Vectorworks install. There seemed a number of firms brought techs over from the mainland, all AutoCAD trained. The 1st week they would be cursing the UI. At a month they were saying they were seeing the sense in it. At 6 months, they should be like this.
dave
Yeah, that's true.. I wasn't actually trying to promote autocad, but that is the one I know how to use. I just wanted to detract from visio. It's not proper CAD software in any way.
I'd think if you spend 15 minutes training a bunch of people on all the various softwares mentioned in this thread, and then have them all draw the same thing, the one using visio would be the last to complete and the most frustrated.
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