New Microstation user

MicroStation is indeed a drafting software.
If you want Mapping capability, you will probably need to actually look into the Mapping software packages. There is a forum for those: https://communities.bentley.com/products/geospatial/desktop/f/bentley-map-forum

GIS/mapping capability in plain Microstation is indeed limited because there is other software for that specialized application.

As Mary said, plain MicroStation's GIS capability is limited.

You mentioned .dbf files, so I'm assuming you have ArcView Shapefile data that also has the corresponding .shp, and .prj files.

If you attach the .shp file as a reference to your design file model you can view the associated .dbf records with the graphics in the Element Properties dialog.

Prior to attaching the shp file you will want to configure the correct Geographic Coordinate System in MicroStation. Then MicroStation can reproject the .shp file correctly by reading the parameters in the .prj file.

One more thing that I hadn't tried in MicroStation CONNECT until now...

If you select all of the elements in the attached .shp file, you can open the Details dialog. The last columns in that dialog will display all of the associated .dbf data.

Okay that is interesting. I haven't tried that yet.  I have 11yrs experience on Arc Map but my organization is agreeing to provide Arc Pro instead.  Which is fine.  But while I was waiting I wanted to see if there was any similar GIS type functionality in Microstation.  I'll give this a try.  Thank you. 

John Griffin said:

I come from a CAD, and GIS background

Microstation is a CAD program. Quite good (although Connect has some bugs, it was a major re-write) but you will suffer some frustration if you're form the Autodesk world. First thing to do is get a list of terminology, they do pretty much the same things, but with different names. If you're good with key-ins, Microstation allows many ACAD commands prefixed with "dwg", should help the learning curve.

GIS is another case. Bentley sells GIS software, so they only incorporated limited functionality in Microstation. Generally, you can import the vectors, but not the attributes. Though with some programming I'm told you can get that data as well. I'm a GIS user, I purchased a less expensive GIS program (Global Mapper) and I export dxf to get stuff into Microstation, eg parcels with parcel numbers. I've always complained that I couldn't get simple vector with attribute data into Microstation and too lazy to write my own routines.