Does AutoCAD Civil 3D sometimes make you feel like it will Never Work? Of course it does. Some days we all feel like the famous Winney-the-Pooh character Eeyore.
"It will never work."
Civil 3D is complex design software with lots of parts and pieces that all work together really well in pretty incredible ways provided you know basically what you are doing in the software, in the real civil design and survey world, AND you have a structure, a process and a plan of attack. It's this last bit that bites most of us.
It's What We Don't Know that Kills Us
The chicken and the egg problem we all face is that we have to know what you are doing to create a workable plan in the first place. The AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012 documentation actually tells us that a plan is necessary in innumerable ways both in writing and by implication. How many people really read all that stuff? A few. Most of us do it as the option of last resort. Most CAD folks that I know have taught themselves to learn by doing. We play around to do it all.
I refer this approach as, "Get 'er Done". That all too famous phrase points to a More essential human truth. Larry the Cable Guy and many other comedians have made a profitable career talking about little else.
While Laughing at Ourselves is Necessary...
We do what worked in the past. We often attempt to make a new tool behave the way we believe it should work and instructions be damned. Trial and error is a tough, expensive, and rarely humorous way to learn. Most of us will also cruise around on the Internet and hunt and peck for immediate and often "free" answers to our current problems and confusions. There are lots more questions and even More answers available these days. That's of course good news and bad news.
Google Proves You Can Make Money From Any and/or Many Answers
I wrote an infamous post a while ago called Find a Gas Station on the customization subject you also might want to read.
More than a few famous people in addition to the comedians (many of them political figures, historians and/or philosophers) have pointed out that More confusion always produces More (career, economic, political and military) opportunity so I just skip the notable quotables and cut to the chase.
Our Past Experience May Not Be Applicable
If Civil 3D (or anything else for that matter) makes you feel like an Eeyore (or an Eore) most of the time, you must do something about that first thing. For lack of proper training and/or experience you are missing the essential understandings about the new structures, processes and probably the basic parts to make the software make sense and become useful for you. Go find the stuff that produces consistent predicable results for you.
Customizing AutoCAD Civil 3D from the ground up is a tough row to hoe.
Without those essentials structures, processes, and parts you just go round and round and become "Ground Up", "Ground Down" or should I just say,
Ground Round
We produce InstantOn Basic products for multiple releases of AutoCAD Civil 3D that include all the stuff you need to Make it Work. They even include the things you don't know you need now that you'll stumble upon later.
We make InstantOn Basic easily affordable too. Who would have thought?