Need an update date Fusion 360 User Manual with full explanations, text,pictures

[Anonymous]

Hi, I'm finding it a rather frustrating experience trying to learn Fusion 360 through the various training videos on your website.

As nice / great as the training videos are (well except for this missing course files, no Closed Captions, no full transcripts),

what would really help me (and I'm sure others as well) would be to have a current downloadable full Fusion 360 User Manual, with lots of written details, texts, explanations and supporting images etc., - that can be used as a lookup reference or as an aid to learning how to use the product.

It's very difficult sometimes to review / find specific information from just using the training videos. Tutorials are great, but often one also needs something with lots of text to look things up.

Please let me know if there is indeed an up to date User Manual for Fusion 360 that I can download.

(I did find some helpful posts in the community forums with some links to PDFs etc, but those are rather out of date now.

What we really need is to have an official web page where one can just download the full latest manual)

Thanks in advance

Glen Johnson

[mike.tessier]

Hi @Anonymous,

Thanks for posting and I am sorry to hear about the troubles you have been having in learning Fusion 360! From your description, it sounds like you may not be making it to the "full" learning site. It sounds like you are landing here. These are more of a basic introduction to the types of things that you can do in Fusion 360 - they are meant to get users excited about the types of things Fusion can do.

There are some more in depth tutorials, linked here for your reference, that are kept more up to date than those introductory lessons. Would you mind taking a peek at those to see if that's along the lines of what you are looking for?

I know that we also have a few partners that provide some training services. However, these are not free (to the best of my knowledge) and each partner has their own specific fees for these services. The listing of all of our partners can be found at the link provided here.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns - I am always happy to lend a hand!

Cheers,

[TrippyLighting]

@mike.tessier  sorry, but Fusion 360's video training materials cover only the very basic stuff and at a noob level and are not suitable to replace comprehensive written reference documentation.

We've had this discussion here on the forum many, many times 😕

[docara]

Hi Mike

I think your answer is disingenuous. Having 'tutorial' videos is NOT the answer.

Every command needs to have a referencing explanation and example on how to use it and in needs to have adequate feedback in use to be enable the user to achieve their required task, this does not happen in F360. I find it incredulous that your colleagues think that adding function is preferable to blitzing the (many) bugs, GUI issues or produce an in-depth help file.

When your business model finally changes and you have to start charging everyone for F360, how do you know which one of us hobbyist/novices could make you money by using your software but hasn't been able to learn how to use adequately so moves to another package (What I am presuming is that there are too many people working on this for it not to be self supporting in the future - people wages have to be paid)

You are missing the point and that on a fundamental level Glen (the OP) me and many others wants to use your software but can't - simple! If it wasn't for people like TrippyLifghting we would have all walked by now and even he is saying to you need to improve the help

Matt

[todd_alford]

Hi @Anonymous,

I am a content writer for Fusion, I can agree that we have a lot of holes in our documentation, and the way that a lot of it was generated it can be overwhelming.  It is also not easy to navigate to.  There are 3 levels of the help documentation.  The first level is more of a marketing overview which is what you can access directly from the program.  Clicking on the Learn more links takes you to a second level with some overview videos and a set of tutorials about a particular workspace (Modeling example found here). 

These first 2 levels are far from comprehensive and do not have the full details of typical product documentation.  Clicking on the "More Concepts", "More How-to's", "More Tutorials", or "See all Fusion 360 Learning" links will take you into a more typical product documentation.

I wrote this page to provide some assistance in navigating through the help.  I also wanted to point you to our Learning Partners page, as there is a free coarse to learn Fusion.  The help is constantly being updated to document new features and we are trying to address missing items.  If you have some specific requests I can bring them up in with my team and we can try to prioritize them.

Sincerely,

Todd Alford

[mawilsonWCR]

And here we are; three and a half years later and still no reference manual.

I just spent an hour trying to find out what the 'Title' field in the 'Properties' dialog is used for. Still don't know. Someone must have thought it was important enough to include it. But, apparently, not important enough to document it's existence. It's the sort of thing reference manuals provide. Ah, but Fusion 360 doesn't need a manual. It has tutorial videos and incomplete help pages. Or you can hire a consultant. 

When I'm working in an application and I see something, I need to be able to understand what it is and why I might use it. I  ought to be able to look it up. I shouldn't have to wade through dozens of tutorials in the hope that one might mention it. Nor should I have to search dozens of pages that just happen to contain one of the words I used for the search. 

Fusion 360 is approaching 8 years old. The lack of some semblance of a reference manual is inexcusable. One would think a software company with the age and experience of Autodesk would have standards in place that require such a thing. 

And here's a hint based on more than 40 years in the software industry: If the feature or element isn't worth the effort to document, including user documentation, it isn't  worth the effort add it to the application.

[len.whitehead]

Hello -

The Fusion 360 Product Documentation is rapidly evolving, and contains a good deal of command reference content.  https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-1C665B4D-7BF7-4FDF-98B0-AA7EE12B5AC2

Though it has evolved quite a bit in the last few years, the Content team continues to build it out and grow the content. 

In this particular case, @mawilsonWCR, can you please tell me which workspace you're working in? I'd like to help find an answer to your question, and make sure we have the needed content in place so others don't encounter the same issue. 

Thanks,

Len

Fusion 360 Content Experience Team

[mawilsonWCR]

Re: the link. Been there. No where near the LOD needed for a reference manual. It was no help at all in my search. There is some goodness, but there are two important parts of any user manual: how-to and, for want of a better term, what-where. The reference part can't be done with a video tutorial. You may feel like what's there has "a good deal of command reference", but it's not sufficient and definitely not for 8 years of effort. Interestingly, most open source projects have user manuals that are basically references. 

The specific missing item that triggered this thread revival was: in Design Workspace -> pick any component in the browser -> right click -> select Properties -> Title field in the Properties dialog. I'm quite certain there are many others and there are many interdependencies that have been discovered or imparted as tribal knowledge not documentation such as the counter-intuitive interactions between part name and part number. 

I don't particularly need to know what it is. I've managed without it so far. But if there is one, there is more than likely others (e.g. the Project Name field in the same dialog) and they may be more important (probably not Project Name, though).

Maybe you should stand up a wiki and let the community fill it out.