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From is the second largest CAD package on the market today. It’s the single largest competitor for and it holds a large share of public transit and infrastructure market. MicroStation is a fully developed drafting package that does everything its competitors can do but it has something of a reputation of being difficult to work with. That view by drafters isn’t entirely warranted, MicroStation is actually a user-friendly package but its problem lies in its decision to do everything differently than their larger competitor.

Why is that a problem? Well, most CAD people out there use AutoCAD, or one of its verticals, and that’s what they’re used to. MicroStation’s designers made a conscious choice to separate their terminology and methods to distinguish themselves from AutoCAD and I think they hurt themselves with that decision. In trying to market their own “brand”, they inadvertently alienated a large chunk of their potential users.

MicroStation is a solid CAD package but the simple truth is it gets a bad rap because CAD users don’t want to learn a whole new way of doing things. With that said, let’s take a look at MicroStation so you can see that it’s more than you might have heard. MicroStation handles all the same basic CAD features, the same as any other package.

You can draw lines, arcs, polylines, primitives and annotation objects. The problem veteran drafters have is that the most basic entry and control functions (mouse picks, right-click, ESC, etc. Dark moon rising trailer. ) are unique to the program.

To end a command you need to right-click, then select the “reset” option from the fly-out menu. MS is primarily a tool based program, where tool selection is based almost entirely on selecting the appropriate buttons from toolbars on the top and sides of your screen. That’s not an uncommon approach for CAD systems but I’ve found that most drafters aren’t big fans of excessive toolbars. They prefer to keep only a small selection of the ones they use regularly on screen.

MS presents a larger learning curve for a new drafter because they need to familiarize themselves with hundreds of button icons and their locations. This becomes even more of an issue when people move from system to system within a company or even to a new firm entirely because the toolbars can be moved and customized by each user, making finding tools more difficult. Like most, MicroStation has a built in system for separating your objects into controllable “levels” that you can turn on/off, alter color and line weights, etc. In past releases, MicroStation made use of a numbering system for controlling levels but that wasn’t popular with users and they have moved to an alpha-numeric naming procedure that you can customize to your own needs. MicroStation also allows you to generate assemblies out of primitive objects that can be named and saved for future use. These objects are referred to as “cells” and they are kept in libraries –logical lists of similar cells- that can be accessed across multiple drawings.

One of the areas where I’ve watched people struggle when they’re first becoming familiar with MicroStation is in the creation of new drawings. Most CAD systems launch a new, blank, file as soon as you open the program but this program does not. MicroStation requires you to have a named, saved, file to work with. That means you have to create and save a file to the network before you can begin working on it. To help with that, the first thing that comes up when you run MicroStation is a dialog that lets you either open an existing file or create a new one.