"William J. Kitchen" wrote:
[snip]
> To be fair, I have seen comments from people who strongly dislike Protel's
> tools.  So when choosing a package the best advice is to get the demos
> and judge for yourself.  Personal taste and work style can have a big effect
> on what tool will work best for you.  If someone says a particular package
> sucks or that it's unintuitive, that may only mean that it doesn't fit the way
> they thing.  But it doesn't necessarily mean it won't fit the way you think.

I have a way to see it;

If you use a PCB design software in daily basis, producing medium and
large size boards, with lots of different components, producing 2 to 4
boards a month, then, it *any* good PCB software will be good for you,
of course, expensive ones will increase your productivity.

If what you are looking for is a nice and easy software to produce small
boards, once each 4 to 6 months, using a handful of components, then
practically everyone will be difficult and not "user friendly", just
because you are not using it very often, you will not learn it very
well, so you will be complaining about it.

In this second case, the suggestion is to use very simple and
inexpensive softwares, with very few resources and features... probably
the ones that allow you to apply a component pad on the layer without
even being using a netlist, would be the recommended.

I already saw some people with almost no experience in PCB's software,
but with large experience in CorelDraw using it to design PCB's... and
they are right.  You should use the tool that is most efficient for you.

Protel is somehow not simple, Eagle has its own user interface (strange
to me).  For many years, I used Tango and Orcad, even the DOS version
was very nice.

It is always a matter of experience and production speed.

Wagner.