Craig Snell
Next year will be AutoCAD’s 40th Birthday. Yes, it really is that old, and I’m sure there are people out there who have been using it for that long, personally, I have been using AutoCAD for just over 30 years, starting on AutoCAD 2.6
Many people still use AutoCAD, maybe as their main design package, or maybe it’s just something that they use for old drawings but it’s still a big part of most design offices, whatever industry they are in!
My question is when was the last time you had any AutoCAD training?
I would suspect most people will answer with “I did the essentials course about 10 years ago” or something similar. I will share something shocking with you, I’ve been teaching AutoCAD for 25 years and the essentials course is exactly that, the essentials if I had to guess I would say in that course we only teach about 15% of the product's capabilities
Would you buy a car and only use first gear?
What I’m trying to say is that no matter how much you use AutoCAD, whether it’s all day every day or once a week, then it’s more than likely that you can be more productive while creating the same drawings.
There are so many commands and workflows that people do not use in their day to day use of the product, take for example Blocks. I would expect many AutoCAD users have experience with blocks, and some people will use them all day. How many people are utilising Dynamic blocks though? This number will be minuscule in the grand scheme of things. Dynamic Blocks can revolutionise how standard drawings can be done, instead of having multiple blocks in multiple locations for M6, M8, M10 Bolts etc, you have 1 dynamic block called Bolt that has got every variation of bolt you could ever need in it, the same goes for something like doors or even electrical/piping symbols.
That is just one small feature, there are so many of these small features and if you add them all up, these will help you become more productive.
That’s just plain old vanilla AutoCAD, and I’m saying you can be a lot more productive with that, now imagine using software written specifically for your type of drawing. If you are creating Electrical schematics then you should be using AutoCAD Electrical, same goes for Mechanical and P & ID. A couple of years ago, Autodesk created “One AutoCAD” giving everyone full AutoCAD access to the vertical products. So please if you think that you are better off using plain old AutoCAD please get in contact, it's sure to be an interesting discussion.
Just to summarise, AutoCAD (and its verticals) are not going anywhere, there will still be many users of the product in 10 years’ time. Can you really afford not to become more productive in it?
Contact your Symetri representative or talk to our technical team about AutoCAD training. We challenge people to work smarter, surely it's about time that person, was you?
