Altium Designer PCB

Rooms? Holy crap! -- How big is pcb going to be? take a look at this free one

My idea exactly. The Altium Design suite (formerly Protel) is the worst EDA suite I ever worked with! Totally non intuitive. The only positive thing about it is that it accepts the old DOS Protel keyboard short-cuts.

You are showing your inexperience here. Cadstar is miles worse than Altium - but in its defense at least it is not marketed at electronic people so it doesn't matter how cr*p it is to use.

Really? Cadstar was sold to Microdyne for schematics & PC layout. They had to change to another package, but found a consultant to maintain older drawings.

Yep - its the sort of thing you get when 'technical management' select the best tools for the job for the engineers.

Isn't any PCB-design package likely to be non-intuitive to someone who has grown up on another package? The Protel engineering crowd loves the program, and claims it's far better than the competition.

Altium purchased P-CAD (originally Tango) some years ago, and has advanced it over the years with most of the same features being added to Designer, SFAICT.

For example, recently they added differential-pair routing, which simultaneously routes two wires together at a specified spacing. I imagine this feature is generally used in a manual-routing mode, perhaps one of the advanced, assisted manual-routing modes, for enhanced PCB performance and appearance.

But I digress.

Last year Altium began migrating the entire P-CAD community to Designer, so the user-base for Designer should grow substantially.

I'm a P-CAD user and like it, so I'm not looking forward to the change. But I've been told by engineers I respect that I'll not regret it. I'll soon know. It was a free upgrade from Altium.

When you updated the PCB from the schematic you were presented a list of every change to be made which included the creation of the default one per schematic sheet rooms.

You had the option of validating all of these changes and could have chosen not to apply any of them including creation of the default rooms.

Rooms are just a device for containing a group of components which you may want to manipulate as a group or apply design rules to as a group.

The most likely reason you don't have all components on the PCB is that you didn't specify footprints in the schematic which the program could find in available libraries. Missing nets can be the result of specifying footprints which don't have pins matching the schematic symbol. You would have been notified of these errors when you applied the changes to the PCB and before if you bothered to validate them first.

I suppose they are wrong then :-) I've made 2 circuit diagrams / PCBs with Altium and it is cumbersome to use in every way. I really needed the manual to figure out how to create a new component and footprint and there is tons of things you really need to know which aren't described in the manual. I never had that problem with other EDA packages (and other software). Recent packages like Layo1 PCB and Orcad Capture / PCB are much easier to use and are mostly self explaining.

Do I need to go into simple default settings like choosing track widths, via sizes? All kludgy. Included libraries.... mostly obsolete parts. And how about changing attributes of a whole bunch of vias later on? First you'll need to become an expert on database queries Altium style so you can build a query and then change the attributes. The whole package just doesn't feel like it was written to create circuits in an easy way.

They probably wrote a spec and send it to India without thinking about someone actually has to use the software. Sure it does everything you want -in the end- but it just isn't efficient and it takes a lot of time to learn where every option has been hidden.

The old Dos Protel PCB just asked to change all similar items like the item you just changed. Click 'yes' and you where done.

I can't speak to all your comments, except to say I've never seen a PCB package that can be used fully without a manual, online or otherwise, and some detailed knowledge.

It's actually a matter of a just few quick clicks.

The character hired to replace the retiring engineering manager wanted everything converted to Visio. :( He wasn't there, very long. Finally, they moved a real engineer into the job, but let him continue to do systems design work.

In P-cad it probably is (as in most PCB packages), but beware of Altium PCB...

It is a few quick clicks. Global editing in Altium Designer is more capable and easier and faster to use than in previous Protel PCB packages.