AutoCAD Electrical...?

I know this is a little off topic, but I figured it would be a good place to ask..

I am used to doing all of my schematics in AutoCAD LT (all the old employer would buy). I would consider myself decent at it, but no where near expert level (maybe barely intermediate). I did manage to create dozens of my own blocks, some of which were fairly fancy, but past that, I just know enough to get what I need done!

At my new job, we have AutoCAD Electrical, which seems a million times better. However, it is a LOT different and more in depth and I would love some training on it in person. Does anyone know of a good place to find training for it? I would really prefer some "in person" live training versus an online class if possible.

I have been looking on the net for such a thing, but I thought someone here may be able to speak personally about something they know about.

Yes, I think you will need some training. I have a few years experience now with Acad electrical and it is a massive program. I can only really say now that after 2 years of reasonably steady work I know the software. I can do pretty much anything I need to do with it including building blocks, setting up templates, setting up a semi network so everyone is sharing the same blocks, running reports etc etc. My boss wouldn't fork out for the training but it really would have paid off in the long run looking back. I would recommend you take the official training from ACAD, these guys really know how to work the software.

A little off topic but we found ACAD electrical to be very buggy and very slow. We have recently taken the jump to eplan after speaking to a couple of people with experience of both. I am about to get training on eplan next month so I'll know how the software is compared to ACAD in a months time or so (The official training program). The demo of Eplan (and also looking at a friend work his version) looks really very good. Everything seems to work much quicker, instead of working on one page at a time with acad, eplan keeps the entire project open so flicking between pages is instantaneous as are cross referencing and bill of materials. These things I found took an age with ACAD. I'll know better in a few months time but I can see eplan decreasing our design time by up to 50%.

I agree with all you said. Similar history with LT and all that. My former employer bought me a set of discs to train me up on AcadE. Don't recall where I picked them from but I never had time to get far into them. I thought they were good though, and I found some links that a guy had that cut through the clutter and was helpful for me to wrap my head around the whats and whys of AcadElectrical.

I found AcadE to be less useful for an end user (me) than for an OEM. If you are building panels all the time and can set up your own sheet sets, styles, databases and title blocks, to create new sets from scratch then go for it.

If you expect to be able to take drawings from multiple vendors and make them fit into your scheme of how AcadE should work...well good luck with that, but I found it to be next to impossible in practice. For end users in many cases Acad vanilla or even LT would have been just fine. I was able to fix up a bunch of drawings and make use of the objects using the electrical version, but I killed a shedload (a term I learned from that Acad training disc) of time...

I never tried any other package but would agree that AcadE and M can both be buggy...

My 2 cents.

The mentioned training videos are online (there's around 125 of them, all a few minutes long). You can watch them at 2X speed so it sounds like he is speaking at a normal pace:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHOYS2iasNM

90% of using ACADE is in knowing that a feature exists and in getting your drawing template set up the way you want it. If watching the videos does nothing more than let you know the feature is there, then its worth it. I've never had any problems with bugs or with it being slow. Start with the tutorial that walk you through the sample drawings that comes with it. The tutorial was created back when ACADE was VIA Wiring diagram and Autodesk has done little to update the tutorial since acquiring it, but it gets you intorduced to the basics. Then go to the you-tube videos because a lot of things have been enhanced.