Don’t know how many of you have received your new software for 2012, either via download or DVD, I have. I had heard some significant changes were being considered for the software on the whole; don’t know if that ever panned out but…. Two things I do know for sure, however; 1.) Acad Elect. 2012 installed much faster than previous versions have, and, 2.) Just like 2009, 2010, and 2011 it has issues right out of the box as it were. I have been told by a number of individuals that I use Acad Elect at an extreme level in relation to its overall flexibility is it true not sure. But I can’t believe that the “strains” that I place on the software would result in the issue that I found after having installed the software, configured it to use our standard blocks, database etc., and drawn one vertical three wire bus. At this point mind you I will admit that the install, and configure process, was done very quickly, more so than in the past, due credit there.
The issue that I found was as follows; I drew, inserted, whichever term you prefer, the vertical three wire bus, then tried to connect a horizontal three wire bus to the vertical one. With snap enabled, set @ 1/16”, the visual “snap on” indicator was lit, essentially everything telling me snap was on and active, the cross hairs floated and as such were not on snap in any way shape or form, end result was the horizontal three wire bus was nowhere near snap. This only seems to occur when one tries to connect a bus to another bus; a single wire in empty space, to the bus, or a three wire bus into empty space, snap seems to works fine.
I have sent this to tech support, which has been able to reproduce the issue and have forwarded it onto the development team. In itself ‘stuff” happens, but I don’t understand how something so fundamental to the software package for years now could just not work. Am I the only one who uses these functions, I can’t believe that to be true however, no one seemingly found this during beta testing. A further puzzlement to me is that virtually every time I have registered issues with tech support with each new rendition of software sooner or later I am told that very few use the software the way I do. This is one thing that I find hard to fathom but if true why, when many Autodesk peoples have suggested that I should be part of the Beta testing process, haven’t they taken me up on my offer to do just that???
Oh well another version of Acad Elect installed and removed within one week because it is of no use to me. It only required one year but eventually 2010 was fixed enough that I could give it to my designers to use. So hope springs eternal for 2012.
Have fun my fellow Acad Electrical gurus once more unto the breach.
