How do you Learn Best?

Hi Everyone!!!

We are currently working on some new Training Materials for all the products we have. What I want to know, is what type of training do you all prefer the most?

The Training we currently offer is:
-Training Videos
-Daily Live Events
-One on One Online Training

But we are also starting to build up the schedule for Traveling to do Onsite training and we are starting to schedule In-house training.

Our goal is that every customer who uses BobCAD, has success while doing so. So if you have any ideas that you think could make the training better for you, please let me know and I can work on integrating some more new training options into the pipeline.

Thanks!!!

Improve the written documentation. I often find that some topics are totally undocumented and some are poorly documented

I can definitely agree that we can always improve documentation and I know that is something that we are always working on.

Could I ask though if you have a specific example you could provide where you found the lacking or missing documentation so we can ensure it’s something that is looked at.

Thanks :slight_smile:

Hello Alex,
when I started with BC-CAM it was hard to get through the technical written documentation. In many cases, I could only find out what was meant just by trying. The entire documentation is extremely wordy and technically written. Maybe I am spoiled by Inventor, Vectric, Rhino, … But really: have you ever looked into the documentation there?
Regards, Harald

Supplement: I strongly believe that an improvement of the GUI would replace half the documentation.

Hello Alex,

following @MpVpRb message and your demand I’ve written down a few things about how I see and experience the BC-CAM documentation.

1
Selecting another section, the navigation menu gets always reloaded.
This makes it difficult to keep the focus on the actual content. Especially because the content is always displayed earlier than the reloaded navigation.
image
The navigation should remain “static”

2
As I write these lines, I’ve been going through pretty much all the navigations. Just to be sure…
Very very few pictures, but tons of text which slays the reader.

Urgent appeal: “A picture says more than a thousand words!” => Introduce each section with those images, user will see when using the software. Based on those images, explain the details. It is very hard to read just text and get the idea, what you are referring/meaning.

Use annotations to refer to them in the explanations.

3
Kick off the annoying ‘Introduction part’


“This topic will explain the , and will provide links to related topics.”

This to me is completely needless. What else of information should be explained as those being selected in the navigation and/or displayed in the header?

Leave it alone and concentrate on the essentials.

4
Explanations for operations are separated on a lot of pages. Merge all pages so that back and forth loading is not necessary.

It is much easier to have everything on one page, especially because you can quickly look between previous/following sections.

5
And (again): explain things with pictures, as the software shows itself to the user!

6
Instead of explaining details with text only, bring self explaining pictures into the game.

Sometimes (and unfortunately only sometimes) a corresponding image is displayed when a parameter is selected in the GUI. And then strangely enough, many of the GUI images have a different representation than those in the documentation => also somewhat misleading.

7
Disappointing: often parameters are simply not listed and thus not explained (e.g. ‘Profile Rough’ - ‘Patterns’: Method ‘Zig’/‘Zig Zag’ when using ‘Side Roughing’; Linking: ‘Direct’/‘S-Link’).
image
Even self-evident things need to be explained. In the end, everyone has a different approach how systems are understood and used.

8
Within the GUI, I would very much like to see things presented more clearly and explained more naturally. This would save a lot of interpretation, consideration and looking up in the online documentation.

  • introduce tooltips wherever possible (headers, parameters, sections) that give a short explanation what to do here

  • wherever values are to be entered with a unit (%, mm, m/s, …), tell the user which unit is to use. There is enough space in the dialogs than having to save in the wrong place here.

  • reduce separate picture information if close together to reduce flicker of images.
    image

  • uses more self-explanatory images and enriches them with hints for every parameter (like in the previous point for ‘Depth’, ‘Center Diameter’ and ‘Center Angle’), so that the user knows which parameter affects what.

Bye, Harald

I see it was 2021 but it might still be helpful today.

Hello, once upon a time I had to buy 12 CDs which were absolutely crucial to getting started with BCC.
If it were possible to have access to all the help files so that those who want descriptions and help in their own language would definitely be the best.
I would happily spend a few hours translating online if I knew it would work in the end.