I started trying to learn this program a couple weeks ago and it is the most unintuitive, slow program that I have ever used. It is like an adventure program with no instructions and if you make a mistake, you die and start over. The "Ribbon" interface is stupid. The point of using a pict is to convey a control or operation without words. So they use a pict AND the words to take up more space which requires pull-downs to get at the rest of the commands that did not fit. Above the Ribbon they put more commands that did not fit in the Ribbon. And, of course, they put another set of commands below the Ribbon to take up more screen space.
Save is not Save, it is Save As. It brings up a window for you to accept the name and location for the file. Every other program just saves to the current name and location. Computer crash? Ha! You die and get to start over. If you Save then Exit you get another window telling you any changes will be lost. Sorry, is it too dim to figure out there were no changes? Cancel? It brings up another window to ask if you really want to cancel. Well, no, I just hit the wrong button of course. Why not make the people that hit the Cancel button by mistake suffer instead of everyone else? Help is not Help, it takes you to a forum where you can ask questions. Not that people here are not helpful but when I want Help, I want a description of how to use a tool or command not have the 5 minute argument or the full half hour.
Starting a drawing a part is only "two clicks". Finishing it take a multitude of clicks to get the dimensions to what you want. Draw on the sketch plane and you get a city block when you are drawing a microchip. It decides on its own points of reference for the dimensions and latches on to them like an Acturian Megaleech latches on to its victim before biting his head off and making off with his space ship. Try to zoom in to get a better view and only the geometry zooms, not the dimensions. They are still piled on top of each other.
Try to rotate the part with the middle button and it rotates about some arbitrary axis. The Spin Center does not work, it displays but you cannot do anything with it. Must be some hidden key that activates it. PTC obviously picked up on Microsoft's fondness of animation. No snap to a view, let's slooowly rotate it around for the most dramatic effect. I am suprised the pull-downs do not work in the same manner.
It took a couple days to draw a tail fin. I only had the cross-section on the body centre line and tip. It took that long to figure out how to cut it on the non-orthagonal plane of the body. Tried inserting it to an assembly, four of them in an X configuration. I had to define the angles as 45, 225, 135 and 405 degrees to get them in order clockwise around the body. 405 degrees? What sort of bizzarro universe does PTC work in? You cannot use negative angles but angles greater than 360 work fine.
We only have this program because someone long ago decided on it and the last two people who used regularly have left. Now I know why the mechanical engineer was always pounding on the keyboard and cursing when using this program. Since they are no longer here and any decent CAD program can read files generated by another I am going to suggest they save a boat load of money and dump Creo for a more user friendly CAD program. I personally have AutoCAD R14, AutoCAD 2009, Inventor and Solidworks, all of which are way more productive than this is.