AutoCAD - Love to hate it!
February 13, 2019
AutoCAD - Love to hate it!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with AutoCAD
I use AutoCAD pretty much every day, whether it's for customers or something internally. We use it to for different reasons. Sometimes it's just to explain a process or steps to do something more clearly, and other times it's submitting to customers to solve a problem.
- AutoCAD gives the user the flexibility to do whatever they want. It can be as simple as possible, or conversely very detailed and complicated.
- AutoCAD pretty much does what you tell it to do. You have to know how to manipulate the settings, in order for AutoCAD to do what you want.
- AutoCAD dimensions with 100% accuracy, allowing precise information to the user.
- The help section is very detailed. Showing steps and images. AutoCAD has a huge learning curve, and a person just cannot remember it all. It's a really good reference.
- One major flaw in AutoCAD is hatching. It gets confused when calculating the areas that you want to hatch. When the area is not closed, it hatches too much, or errors out. There should be a setting to be able to still hatch the area intended when it's not closed with a tolerance setting. Kind of like fill the gaps smaller than .0625".
- When editing MTEXT, AutoCAD automatically edits in uppercase or lowercase, depending on what it was previously set to. Sometimes, you want the opposite. If you have a line of text in uppercase, but you want a word in lowercase, you have to hold down shift.
- One of my rules is to never explode dimensions. But, sometimes you have to. There should be a way to explode a dimension, do your edit, then reattach all the entities of the dimension. This would be a really nice feature.
- Once you have a competent AutoCAD user, with some years of experience under their belt, the ROI is endless. You are able to convey information using AutoCAD far greater than trying to explain using words.
- With AutoCAD dimensions, you are able to get exact measurements. Humans make mistakes, and AutoCAD will calculate dimensions accurately, eliminating errors. This saves time, and saves money.
AutoCAD is the only drafting program that I have ever used, so i cannot compare.