software for writing documentation

Hello to all.
I was wondering if anyone of you ever worked with eplan?
I heard it's good software but very difficult to learn. Maybe next month I'll get chance to work with it, so I need to hear a little more from about it. Which software do you use?
What is your experience?
Thanks

Eplan is more or less a standard with some companies over here. It is a complete management package for electrical cabinets. You can draw schematics with it, manage your purchases and stock and so on. It isn't hard to use the drawing module, at least I didn't think so when I got an intrduction, but if you want to use all available possibilities, I think it's something completely different. But you can compare it to the MS Office package: have you ever heard about someone who uses all gimmicks available in Word or Excell? Well, I didn't.

Kind regards,

Thanks for reply. I used to draw schematics in MS Visio (and others too), but now there are romours that firm is going to buy eplan, so I wanted more informations from someone who has experience.

I haven't used it myself, but I spent a while working for a company who did use it as standard. I got the impression that it was quite easy to screw things up if you did things in the "wrong" or non-standard way. While I was there the one woman, who was the only person in the firm who really knew her way round e-plan, had a full time job sorting out the ****-ups which had been caused by the outside sub-contractors, who had been hired to do the work previously done in house by engineers who had been fired in a cost-cutting exercise. I was there for three months and in that time she did nothing else! [irony]I'm sure they must have saved themselves a fortune![/irony]

Either way, it does seem to be a program that requires proper training and is not suitable for "learning by doing".

Yes it appears so! Licence for the program is not very expensive, but training cost is another story. I think I'll be working in Visio for a long time.
Thanks for infos!

I've just finished my first design in ePlan and my impressions are favourable. I went on a two-day training course prior to starting (and feel this was worthwhile) and have found it much preferable to AutoCAD. Our reason for moving was for compatibility with the Euro company that owns us, but we think it may take up to 30% out of our drafting costs by the time we are all up to speed.

The free drawing feature is pretty lousy though, I would still use AutoCAD or similar for tight layouts.

Dear friend,

E-plan is an interesting program and much faster to design electrical controls compare to AutoCAD. I am using it since 3 years and my advice is that you should go for training because their manual is very limited. There are lots of features like automatic generation of schematics and PLC, which are not explained in their manual. I believe they want to make money from training!!!



Good luck.

There are lot of CAD packages for Electrical Design. One I prefer alll the time is ELCAD from Aucotec. The reason to use this CAD is full set of functionality.

With a topic of "software for writing documentation" why is everyone only talking about the Electrical Design?

Documentation of software is much more than that. The wiring is just the bottom level of an application.

E-Plan and the like do not help you to design and document the Software itself. For example, the modularity of the software, sequence charts, detailed loop configurations and things like the many soft parameters an application needs.

My software is designed for that. Potentially I believe it could also be used for the electrical design, it already produces IO Lists. But that area is not yet well developed – does anyone want to help improve that aspect? Email me directly if you like.