AutoCAD LT

I have access to the 2010 version of this software.   I am not proficient at it and pretty much don't know it all.  I have very little AutoCAD background.  I imported in a DXF file and would like to do offset calcs for staking and generate coordinates and ASCII files.  I don't see this capability in there.  Can it do these functions?

ls7454, I have Autocad LT.  The only reason I bought it is: 1) it is inexpensive ($800 in 2008), and 2) so I could open provided AC files without having the deal with import/export issues in Microstation. 

In order to do any cogo functions or coordinate manipulation, you will need additional software.  About all you can do in bare bones AC is edit text, draw simple lines, plot, likely some more stuff.  But it is not for surveyors if they expect to do survey work with it.   I don't use it for much and I'm no AC expert, but don't expect much else.  Sorry for the bad news.

I think you would need full-blown Acad with something like LDD or Carlson with embedded autocad to work with coordinates.

Even though it's tempting to look at the Carlson Survey with the embedded AutoCAD, if you decide to look into purchasing Carlson I'd definitely make sure to take a close look at the IntelliCAD version before purchasing. It's (a lot) cheaper and, in my opinion, provides more functionality than the embedded version.

Jennifer

You could try copan for windows, free from www.underhill.ca.

It is a decent cogo program that will do offsets, etc.

Autocad LT is pretty useless for Civil work.  And customizations are disabled, so you can't even do something like buy a third-party program to beef it up.

If you have plain Autocad (the full version, not the LT version), you can get third-party add-ons like Terry's tools at DotSoft, which might let you do what you want to do.  Or go with Carlson.  Or, if you're looking at Autodesk's offerings, then you have to go with Civil 3D - LDD is dead.  (If you've never used LDD before, don't start now...  It was never that great to start with, and now that it's been replaced with Civil 3D, any effort invested in learning LDD right now would be largely wasted time.)

J DiBona:
Even though it's tempting to look at the Carlson Survey with the embedded AutoCAD, if you decide to look into purchasing Carlson I'd definitely make sure to take a close look at the IntelliCAD version before purchasing. It's (a lot) cheaper and, in my opinion, provides more functionality than the embedded version.

Jennifer

It would have had to grown an incredible amount from the 2009 version, then.  When I looked at Carlson 2009 on Intellicad, it was missing too much to even be considered.  Ignoring the parts in Carlson, it felt more like using R13 Autocad.  We use Sheet Sets, Annotative Text, MLeaders, and countless other features that were all missing.

But then, we use Civil 3D, and actually use almost that entire program.  So we tend to hammer the bleeding edge of our technology.  Civil 3D does what we need (once we add some additional third-party software for Survey support), and we don't view it as overkill, the way some do.  By contrast, all the fancy stuff we've been doing is winning us clients, and keeping us moderately busy while companies around us are going under.

 

If you have Civil 3D and it's working for you, that's great. If you depend on items such as Sheet Sets, Annotative Text, MLeaders and such, then it's probably worth spending the additional $6,500 or so on it. I love those features of AutoCAD myself... but it's tough to underprice $FREE.

Jennifer DiBona
www.thatcadgirl.com

And yet I manage to do complex ALTA surveys with just AutoCAD LT, no additions.

If that works for you, then great.  Some of the data collectors these days do a lot.  I presume that if you are doing complex ALTAs with LT, you are doing something like Field-to-Finish in your data collector, and dumping that into LT for touch-up...?

But something like Civil 3D or Carlson Civil lets you do far more than that.  From boundary work to construction calcs, these programs contain many tools that greatly enhance the speed we can do a vast range of civil-related tasks.

A few years back, when we were still using Land Desktop, we had a job where we setup a remote office in a trailor on the job site for a while, and one of our employees worked out of there.  It was shared with the GC, who also had three CAD techs in there, all using Autocad LT.  They were mostly doing nothing but some relatively simple as-built drawings, and stuff like that.  But one of them would spend eight hours doing something we could do in 15 minutes with LDD.  In fact, they often asked us to do things for them, because we could do them so much faster.  But they could have had one employee with Land Desktop, and gotten more done than they did with three employees hammering away on Autocad LT.  And now with Civil 3D, we can run circles around what we used to do with Land Desktop.  That actually allows us to be extremely responsive to our clients - when there's an issue, we can often come up with a solution very quickly.  Our clients like that, and we've had many of them comment on how responsive we are, compared to other Surveyors.

We've also found that, in this day and age, we have to be "more" than we used to be, in order to remain competitive.  So we're becoming fluent with the GIS arena, often combining Survey and GIS data.  Most of our projects these days are georeferenced, and we use aerial imagery a lot.  We deal with coordinate conversions a lot.  We have to deal with receiving lots of different data in lots of different formats from lots of different sources, and managing it all coherently.  In fact, I couldn't dream of trying to do Surveying with only Autocad LT, and no other software.

I really think this industry is changing, and we're starting to see a bifurcation.  There will always be a demand for low-cost mortgage surveys and that sort of thing, so we see the current trend toward brokers and all that continuing and becoming the "norm" for that.  Then there will be another class of Surveyors, who fully understand all the new technology, including GPS, scanning, GIS, and how the entire "grand picture" fits together, and can support new technologies like Navisworks and all it entails, the "augmented reality" stuff, and all that other new technology.  At our company, we'd rather be in the latter class.  And we have no hope of that, using Autocad LT.

Good points Richard. I think he main problem with Autocad software is their price. They probably drive alot of their potential customers to illegal stuff because of their pricing.

Here I use Carlson Survey with Intellicad. As my business grows I will start to use AutoCad. If it was just slightly less I would have put the Carlson on AutoCad by now.