New Microstation user

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.

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.

Global mapper is great! My colleague in West Australia swears by it... But I'm forced to use free QGIS which takes  a lot more steps to do the simplest stuff.. but its free... I've heard from one developer Adam Lambert creator of Caddpro he has made tools for CE to Label the attributes from Shp files with VBA as text Fields .. but not free , however our company has a subscriotion to his tools so I'll be using it when I update to CE.