AutoCAD 2007
80/20 rule: roughly 80 percent of the capabilities of AutoCAD for roughly 20
percent of the money. (Actually, with recent price creep, it's now more like a
75/25 rule!) Like AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT runs on mainstream Windows com-
puters and doesn't require any additional hardware devices. With AutoCAD
LT, you can be a player in the world of AutoCAD, the world's leading CAD pro-
gram, for a comparatively low starting cost.
product line of programs with AutoCAD as a
base and specialized, discipline-specific add-
ons built on top and included as one complete
product. As an AutoCAD 2007 user, you'll be
looking for the 2007-compatible versions of
these tools, which should appear a few months
after AutoCAD 2007 ships. These discipline-
specific flavors of AutoCAD include Autodesk
Architectural Desktop, Autodesk Building
Systems (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumb-
ing), AutoCAD Mechanical, Autodesk Map 3D,
Autodesk Land Desktop, Autodesk Survey, and
Autodesk Civil 3D.
Autodesk also offers two flavors of Autodesk
Revit (Revit Building and Revit Structure) and
Autodesk Inventor, software applications that
compete with Architectural Desktop and
are not based on AutoCAD; they sacrifice
AutoCAD compatibility in favor of a more fun-
damental design- and 3D-oriented approach to
CAD. Whether they ultimately replace the tradi-
tional AutoCAD-based applications remains to
be seen. While many architectural firms have
not made the leap to Revit, their mechanically-
oriented colleagues do seem to be favoring
Inventor over Mechanical Desktop.
sands of AutoCAD add-on products -- both dis-
cipline-specific and general-purpose -- are
available from other software developers.
These companion products are sometimes
called