Documentation

This is the VanCAD reference. Every panel, tool, menu and control in the app has an entry here answering the same five questions: what it is, what it does, what its options and limits are, what it affects in your design, and which guide shows it in a real build.

It is written to be looked things up in rather than read front to back. If you already know what a control is called, search is the fastest route; if you know where it lives on screen, the sidebar mirrors the app’s own layout.

Where to start

• New to VanCAD? Getting started walks the screen and names everything on it. The guides cover the same ground as worked examples instead of a reference.
• Learning by doing? The app’s own interactive tutorials teach a flow step by step, inside the app, from the Tutorials button on the toolbar.
• Stuck on one button? Hover it in the app’s help mode (the Help button dims the editor and explains whatever you point at), then come here for the full story.

How this reference is organised

The sections follow the app rather than any idea of a curriculum: the toolbar, the 3D view, the van, the things you place in it, what you do to them, the systems you route through it, and the outputs you take away. Inside a section there is one page per surface - a panel, a menu, a dialog or a tool - and one entry per control on it, so a page matches what you are looking at on screen.

Not the guides

The guides stay where they are and do a different job: task-based walkthroughs and complete build case studies, written to be read start to finish. These docs are the random-access reference. Reference pages link out to the guide that shows a control in a real workflow, and the guides link back here for the controls they touch.