Thanks for letting me vent yesterday guys! After a few drinks last night, I felt better
In college in the late 80's I had a semester of Unigraphics back when cad was not too common at many shops. In '91 I got a job where I work now. We did everything on the drafting boards. A year or two later, we got a job that required all drawings to be on Autocad so my boss had to buy a copy. I was the youngest guy in engineering there and I volunteered to figure out how to use it. This resulted in me moving up the ladder there as I went from mainly detailing and updating drawings to actually doing a good bit of designing. From that time on, I took on the title of "The Cad Master"
The other guys felt like I do now in regards to SW.
I honestly believe SW will be a good thing once I become a "master" at it, but looking back, I still think Autocad is easier to learn to use when doing simple drawing tasks. I never took any classes yet I was able to easily figure out how to create and manipulate solids in Autocad, whereas Solidworks just makes no sense initially.
I did a few tutorials when we first got it, and a SINGLE solid was not too difficult compared to Autocad, but trying to figure out how to attach it to a second part and manipulate it is not very intuitive compared to Autocad.
Yesterday, I was in a pinch to quickly figure some reach issues with an urgent quote we were working on. I went to download a 3D Fanuc robot in an Autocad .dwg drawing (we used to have a Fanuc program that had all their robots in 3D, but we no longer have that program) but the 3d version was only available in Solidworks. I thought screw it....I have Solidworks on my computer, I will simply open it up and manipulate it a bit and I will have my issue on robot reach answered. Well that was an exercise in futility. I was as p!ssed off as I have been in a long time at work as I told my boss I would have an answer for him shortly.
As I said before, I do not doubt that someday I will master SW and then sing it's praises.....but not yesterday
