AutoCAD 2011's help is the new Release 13

Over at blog nauseam, Steve Johnson has taken the lead in exposing the problems with AutoCAD 2011's new HTML-based help system (www.blog.cadnauseam.com/2010/04/23/autocad-2011-help-system-is-not-popular). 70% of responders to his opinion poll find the new system poor.

It certainly doesn't work for me. Into AutoCAD's infobar search field I enter a command I am wondering about (layoutwizard, most recently), and it returns a droplist of possible results. I click on the one I want (Command Reference: layoutwizard), and nothing happens.

(The solution: Hunt down the base HTML file in the autocad/help folder, drag it into the browser, and then add it as a bookmark. The base file is C:/Program Files/Autodesk/AutoCAD 2011/Help/contents.html)

That's just the start of problems. The content of the 2011 help is incomplete and incorrect. Some command options are not described; some descriptions are wrong; others link to unrelated topics. Example: try learning how the new Expression option works.

The new Web-based system is inconvenient, changing from the two-side-by-side-pane format (in the old CHM system) to a two-overlapping-window system. 

Part of the problem is that AutoCAD's commands have become incredibly complex and intertwined. In an earlier posting, I reported that the SheetSet Manager palette links to 19 dialog boxes, most of which are "hidden" in shortcut menus, whose content varies, depending on where you right-click; some of those dialog boxes are also used by other commands.

The total number of commands and system variables in AutoCAD 2011 stands at 1,297 -- and that's just the ones documented by Autodesk; dozens and dozens of others are not.

This is the reason for the switch over: so that users could access the most up-to-date help topics online from autodesk.com (from the cloud, as it were), rather than the static version sitting on your computer's hard drive. (This is handled by three help-related system variables that are -- wait for it -- undocumented.) As Mr Johnson notes, HTML help has become a poor advertisement for the "benefits" of the cloud.

The decline in quality is unfortunate, for at one time Autodesk had the best documentation in the industry, as established by co-founder Duff Kurland. It is a puzzle to me that this year it went so bad so quickly. Perhaps it is a plot to get users to pay for training?

Update

Autodesk Support reports, "There are known issues with search performance and search results using the AutoCAD 2011 Online Help and we are actively working on a fix." 

And so they have released a CHM (compiled HTML) version of the AutoCAD 2011 help file, which operates as in previous releases. Read about it and download the 187MB file from here:http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?id=15068206&siteID=123112&linkID=9240618

Except that it still doesn't let you search for help on computers running 64-bit Windows 7. 

The work-around for that is to download the PDF version of the help files. Sigh, this rather is like the days of R13 and its 11 updates.

Comments

[Tony Tanzillo]

Don't feel tool bad about the AutoCAD docs.

Autodesk apparently is no longer providing ObjectARX API documentation to customers.

On their API download page, it says:

"Please Note: the Complete ObjectARX SDK includes the 2010 documentation. For the most recent 2011 documentation, please download the Documentation as well."

And in spite of that, the AutoCAD 2011 ObjectARX API documentation is nowhere to be found.

They say that one way to drive up your share price is to cut costs by sticking it to your customers. I suppose they're learned that one.

[Tony Tanzillo]

"Perhaps it is a plot to get users to pay for training?"

Ignoring the irony that your blog page is chock-full of advertising for training, I don't think the underlying motive is to get users to pay for training.

What is not obvious unless you carefully read the privacy policy for accessing Autodesk Web sites, is that everything you do on Autodesk's web site is tracked and monitored, to the point where the practice raises serious privacy issues that are beginning to get the attention of legislators.

So, it would appear that Autodesk intends to collect data relating to the use of the online documentation.

[Tom Vasquez]

It just seems to me that Autocad team does not believe in the providing help anymore. The quality of the help has been constantly going down in the last few years as well.

I remember when Deep Cloning was introduced with stellar documentation but now there are features that have not been documented in the last few years.

[Tom Vasquez]

Yes you are right about tracking user activity by autodesk on there website. I found the following JS snippets on the pages. There are a lot more similar things.

"var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-2967772-176");
pageTracker._trackPageview();"

[Steve Johnson]

Release 13 had the original FCS (sometimes called R13c0) plus 10 updates. The updates were R13a, R13c1, R13c2, R13c2a, R13c2b, R13c3, R13c3b, R13c3a (yes, in that order), R13c4 and R13c4a.

The updates weren't the problem, only a symptom. Shipping unfinished software in the first place was the problem. Same story here, 15+ years later.

[Ralph Grabowski]

Or in then-ceo Carol Bartz's famous words, "It's a marketing issue, not a technical one."

[Sunith Babu L]

As long as there is a decline in the help topics, training and video based helps will flourish.

I think I must take advantage of this . . .
:-)