Parametric Cell Studio

At the moment I prefer pcs but it do have many issues.

Like creating a window that works in PCS but not in MS

Compound cells take a fraction of time to create, work all the time, do everythign a pcs file will do except:

You cannot change variables on the fly.  Like width and height.
And they do not add annotations to your drawings

But for very complicated windows they are much easier to create and use.

I personally will probably never use PCS. I opened it up. read all the help files and still could not make any sense of how to start a new object. Hence Im only using compound cells. And some of teh delivered paz files.

I honestly could not understand why Bentley didnt create a compound cell studio where you use DDdesign (dimension driven design) to drive the objects dynamic values??

I managed to speak to someone who has close affiliations with Bentley very recently and was told that the reason why the level of documentation on Bentley Architecture in general  is so poor is that the people who write the actual  program language and those that demonstrate the software are not Architects  or construction professionals ( or authors for that matter) and therefore there is great difficulty in bridging the gap and explaining the inner workings and processes  of the program flowing along developing a design project from scratch on the back of an envelope to when the first spade goes in and beyond.  This has left quite a lot open to interpretation, (Which can be a good thing).  I was also told that it was only recently that an effort was made to bring in someone with good field experience to sit down with these people and work out a way to explain and document the various bits from a project related point of view.

This has been my impression. It seems to be a program written by programmers that have no real understanding of how AEC people work, or how a building really goes together. A building is not a symetrical, geometric problem. Buildings can be anything you want it to be.

Take a good look the the Curtainwall tool in BA. It is a pure equation based soloution to a building element that in reality is not a symetrical in any way. Mullions do not occur at regular intervals hence the tool becomes absolutely useless as an architects or engineers tool in the real world.

BA tools need to be designed with a building in mind and not just pure modelling tool.

Bentley are quite welcome to offer me a job in looking at this area if that's what it's gonna take.