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Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Microstation Fundamentals

I finished the Microstation Fundamentals from Prosoft. The book was easy to use and gave the basics of how to do things in Microstation. In doing the exercises I found that I really like using the command line in Autocad. In Microstation most of the commands, at least in the exercises, used toolbars and windows. It became frustrating not being able to just type tr for the trim command and having to use the toolbars. I realize I can use the Microstation command line feature, but with all of the other windows on the screen, it's hard to just type in a command and have it be recognized by the program.

Hopefully I can find a way to get Microstation to work like I want to, but right now it appears that it is mainly toolbar driven. I find I don't like toolbar driven programs for CAD, since I have to scan the screen to find the wanted toolbar, and I always seem to know where the keyboard is at in Autocad to type in the command.

I wrote previously that I didn't like the user interface in Microstation, and now that I know how to do the basics and where to find things, I still don't like it. The windows and toolbars and single drawing interface is really a bummer. The program needs to join the world of windows instead of feeling like a skin on a DOS program.

Some things to like in the program is the Design History. In Design History you can commit changes into the file and then go back and restore changes that happened in between your committing changes. I don't know how big of hit it is to the file size, but I imagine it can be quite large if you committed changes frequently.

And cells are basically blocks.

Next up is the InRoads Fundamentals.

1 comment:

Keith Rice said...

There is a way to configure Microstation to allow AutoCAD key-in commands and I'll plan to post a follow-up comment with additional info.

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