Small Project Design

I am a sole practitioner working alone. Fifteen years ago, someone offered to teach me autocad 14 and it was a disaster. Perhaps it was the teacher, perhaps it was the complexity of the program. Luckily, I received a postcard from cadkey, now datacad. Purchasing that program, in DOS at the time, was the best software investment I have ever made. While not as versatile and widespread as autocad, it is architecturally oriented and commands seem to be more intuitive and require less steps. It can also translate autocad with reasonable effectiveness. I just purchased the latest version as it keeps getting better and better.

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Gary Chartoff AIA
Gary Chartoff, AIA
Ridgefield NJ
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I have had some experiences with selecting cadd programs and I made one really bad choice and an excellent choice.  I have used Microstation, AutoCAD, and now use Softplan.  I found the first two far to complicated in their command structure to make for easy learning and production to meet my needs.  I dont sit a a computer every day drafting, remembering the commands way too laborious for this old velum and ink guy.   The Softplan program is like a contractor building a house, if you know how to do that, you can draw it and its a good 3D presentation tool also.  Its portable as a 2d cad program both in out of Autocad, I still use Autocad for my comercial projects that already have AutoCad base drawings. In my opinion worth a look at.

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Robert Tobin AIA

Robert L. Tobin, Architect
Stratford CT
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