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  • Author Author: e14softwareuk
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Announcement: The CircuitStudio Knowledge Base is Live

Altium and element14 have come together to create a repository of articles to help the CircuitStudio community. This Knowledge Base will build over time to become an excellent source of information about all aspects of using and maintaining Altium CircuitStudio, so although there is some content currently available keep your eye on this space, and let us know what you think and what you would like to see.

 

The Knowledge Base is a database of tips, hints, and solutions that help to fill the information gap between Documentation and Support, and provide another avenue to find help on your own. It contains articles written by support professionals at Altium and element14 with new articles continuously being added as the need arises.

 

We are allowing commentary within the Knowledge Base so we can get feedback to improve the articles, as well as receive requests for additional information and things of that nature, within context of the topic of discussion.  However it is important to mention that this space will be moderated to try to keep it as a curated collection of knowledge.  So please keep any Knowledge Base commentary in context with the topic you are posting on.  Of course, for requests for information and things not yet covered in the Knowledge Base we would still encourage you to post your questions on the forum.  As these questions are answered, we will curate content from these answers to format and create new Knowledge Base articles.

 

Knowledge Base

 

Handy shortcuts for online CircuitStudio support.

www.element14.com/altium - CircuitStudio user forums

www.element14.com/altiumkb - Official CircuitStudio knowledge base

  • Sadly Altium really do not care about you or me Andy. I was contacted by Altium offering me Altium Designer at a 30% discount and nearly £5K. They are mad, completely bonkers. If I wanted AD I would have just bought it. The price has also risen sharply over the last couple of years as last time I was offered it it was that for the full price. When i protested that if CS is supposed to give me an appetite for AD they needed to take a serious look at themselves they said that if I was a start up business I could get AD even cheaper. In a conversation on the phone it emerges that Altium are working on an even more expensive software than AD so really it is clear that they do not give a toss about CS users, they are treating it as a freebee to get people into AD except we paid nearly £1K for it. I have a very very bitter taste left in my mouth by Altium, yes they seem to make one of the best softwares but they clearly do not know how to treat customers. And that is completely reflected in the joke of documentation. Meanwhile with no support from Altium Farnell are trying to keep this thing going as it makes them money. God knows how they expected to sell it for £2500 in the past.

  • I too would like to see a manual.  When you need some information, it is nice to look through the index.  I don't know about you but I don't remember all there is to know about any program.  What I don't understand is why Altium has not done a better job of documenting this program.  I have used the Altium program in the past and they have a ton of information available to help with that program. So why not port some of it over to CS.  I always thought Altium was over-kill for all of the projects that I work on over the years.  I retired and was looking for a program that i could use at home.  Altium was way to expensive for what I wanted to do but the CS came out and it had what I was looking for without all the bells-N-whisles that I don't need.  In order to get some answers, I have even referred to my old copy of the Altium manual that I still have.  There are some very similar things between CS and Altium - which I would expect.  Oh well. Hopefully things will improve.

    Andy.

  • in reply to Sparkylabs

    Agreed, the two are very different forms. We have tried to make the KB as useful as possible, the search within the KB page limits itself to just KB articles whereas the search on the main Altium forum page includes all user content as well as KB articles. Clicking on the All KB Content button brings up a list of documents and the tag cloud in the right hand column is a sort of index (obviously not the same but best we have for now).

  • Well the knowledge base is not the easiest thing to search by say an index, nothing like a good book image

  • in reply to Sparkylabs

    Unfortunately I don't know of any plans for Altium to publish a full PDF manual, agreed that this format would suit some people. We do report issues with the documentation pages to Altium where there is very clearly missing or incorrect information, usually in response to customer support queries where documentation could have helped. The plan is to continue this but to also add to the knowledge base so that such information is not lost and can help others with the same question or issue.

  • in reply to e14softwareuk

    It sounds like the altium documentation will not necessarily be updated and this will become the current up to date source. online and constantly updating is great but sometimes it's nice to have an actual "manual" with an index and topics arranged together. Is there scope for say all of this information to feed into a PDF document that can be updated periodically which will gradually form a complete manual on how to use the software. It does not look like images will be used much and perhaps the blog system does not support them as well as perhaps creating a proper word document would that can be published say every 2 weeks to a month as a PDF with latest updates.

  • in reply to Sparkylabs

    The aim is to concentrate the effort on just two areas to make finding information easier, the official documentation and the element14 Altium forums / knowledge base. The former is maintained by Altium whereas the element14 areas are jointly updated by both and can be updated in real time in response to customer support requests to provide very up to date and relevant information.

  • um creating more and more source of information does not help, we need one set of comprehensive documentation. So having admitted that the "documentation" is missing things why not simply expand on it?