<What do you think E', is ACAD2000 God's gift to CADgeeks or what?

Truth? Like everything else, it depends on who's running it.

So as not to totally indulge in shoptalk beyond the ken of the vast majority of readers here, suffice it to say that Acad2000 is the first time AutoDesk has managed to force their original DOS-based product to behave in a Windows environment as handily as, say, MS Word or Excel. Best feature: multiple windows open in a single 'edit session' (i.e., single invocation of the software). Second best feature: multiple levels of nested xrefs are finally handled cleanly - if set up right by the originator. (An 'external reference,' aka XREF in Acad parlance, is a way of using a copy of a drawing file as an unalterable background, to which one can add information, like the old overlay system from the end of manual drafting days, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth).

However - in my last engineering gig (two months dead now) the conversion from R14 to 2000 occurred at the same time as a completely new issue of corporate layering standards: naming, color vs. pen-weight and shading assignments - the whole nine yards. With little warning. Without training. We were told: "By such-and-such date, all current projects shall be converted to ACAD2000" [in actuality, to the severely top-heavy, 3D-oriented Architectural Desktop 3.0] without saying how, or by whom. There was a two- or three-week period when no one was quite sure who was doing what in which version - and as you can probably guess, the deadlines didn't change even though most of us had been summarily thrown halfway back down the learning curve.

Sour grapes? Who, me?

Given the right employers (need a drafter, Steve?) and people who know how to keep the database lean and mean (does the command "purge" ring a bell?) - and most of all, people who realize that the end product is still 2D lines on a piece of paper ... [rant, rant] then, yeah, I'd be real comfortable using Acad2000. For the time being, I'm just as happy that this is the first reference I've made to the software, let alone having to use it, since the middle of August.

E'