At 09:48 AM 10/7/2005, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The same thing happen to me too that i feel that Protel ways of doing things is illogical and confusing to the point that i have to go back to OrCAD and finish up the job via Protel's save in order to please my fab house as they are not able to open other files other than Protel .pcb format.
If you are an OrCAD user, it is not surprising that you would think Protel's way of doing things "illogical and confusing." After a little experience with Cadstar and a cheap program called EasyPCB, I started out as a Tango user, which began as Protel Easytrax and diverged with the release of Autotrax and Tango Series II. But the philosophy remained the same, and the program's ways of doing things seemed refreshingly simple and clear to me, easy to learn.
And when I was forced to use OrCAD, I found it *extremely* difficult to learn and confining. (not to mention buggy, this was Layout v.7.)
The point is that experience with one CAD system can lead one to believe that another is "illogical and confusing." Now, I had many experienced OrCAD users who also were experienced Protel users tell me that, other things being equal, OrCAD was harder to learn. But if you started with OrCAD, as I said, and you learned all the idiosyncratic ways that OrCAD does things, they will seem natural to you and you will find Protel frustrating.
I seriously doubt that there is anything you needed to do that you could not have done in Protel. But you simply didn't know how to do it, so to save time, you went back to OrCAD. However, it might have taken less time to learn the Protel way.
I used to joke: "When you, as an OrCAD user, find yourself frustrated with Protel, don't bang your head against the wall. That's the OrCAD way, it doesn't work with Protel. Instead, ask on the user list."
You will often find that the Protel way turns out to be simple and easy to learn, but you just didn't expect it.
Really. Where you think that OrCAD does something better than Protel, in a few instances you might be right. After all, OrCAD costs significantly more (or at least it did, I haven't looked lately) than Protel. But quite often, if you learned the efficient way in Protel, it is just as good and often better, that is, faster. Once you know it.
When you don't know how, it can take you days to figure out how to do something. Don't waste the time, if it does not become obvious to you after a few minutes (maybe reading the manual), then ask.
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