Customer Reviews

TurboCAD Mac Deluxe v5 2D/3D

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are a total CAD novice, then don't expect sufficient tutorials with Turbo-CAD. I had to buy separate tutorials that ended up costing me more than the the TurboCAD. Once I went through those tutorials, I was able to use the product, but not without the additional support from a third party source.
The tutorials that come with TurboCAD are borderline worthless for beginners.

Very powerful product. Has many features. Most functions are very intuitive. Unfortunately, some don't seem to work well with my setup (iMac, 2 gig). An example being the wall/door/window feature. I purchased the product primarily for making residential layouts. When I used the wall function, the response time on my computer became very slow (watched a lot of beach balls). I finally reverted to the less sophisticated methods. Also, tutorials could be better. I don't mind spending more time watching tutorials...Turbocad's tutorials seem to be very short and almost too basic. The manual is the same...doesn't explain in enough detail. I gave 4 stars because this is a very powerful product for a good price.

I have used TurboCAD on PCs and more recently MACs probably back to version 1 on the PC, and more recently version 3 on the MAC. TurboCAD version 5 is a good program for visualizing designs and has many powerful tools; however, it does have a significant flaw. It does not handle special characters properly in the object editor. Although you can work around this by typing the data correctly the first time, if you update or find you have made an error, editing is not an option since the object editor does not handle special characters such as ' (degrees) properly. Needless to say it is very time consuming, to retype all updates or corrections and hopefully you don't accidentally click the object editor in the process. I haven't tried to see what happens when you export.
I discussed this with technical support while considering upgrading to Version 6, but this flaw also exists in version 6. Tech Support was unable to give me a planned fix date or work-around, but they did indicate it was at the top of their list.
So, my recommendation is that if you are just using this for ideas, visualizations, etc it is fine and probably a good inexpensive CAD program. However, if you are using it to design or document, beware that it doesn't handle commonly used special characters, such as degrees, properly.
My experiences with the Tech support have been good to excellent. They are very responsive.

So far I am just getting familiar with this program since I do not have a CAD background. I think it will do the job. My only concern is not being able to draw double lines for walls in plan view. I think earlier programs had this feature. However, perhaps I have over looked something. Anyway it seems to be a great program.