Using TIA portal instead of classic step 7

We have been migrating to V13/V14 and I personally like the HMI side of Portal much better than Simatic Manager. I feel like it is much more seamless in setting up.
 
TIA V15 is quite allright now.

Agree with pretty much everything Jesper said. Optimized/Non-optimized is a stupid kludge for backwards compatibility. To me, the fact that Siemens is still holding onto things like the S5 timers for backwards compatibility is holding them back.

However, I've had a different experience with the FW than he has. When using the auto-detection feature, CPU FW has to match exact. However, modules are usually backwards compatible. Newer FW usually is able to pretend that it is older FW, either for a CPU or an IO module. However, you may need to change the CPU setting for whether it goes into run with mismatches or not.
 
I agree with jesper in 1. It is almost impossible to work with this software on a laptop unless you have a big screen an a high resolution.
 
Portal has had a Cross reference for a while, and it sometimes even includes both PLC and HMI references in one place.

However, Portal completely changes all the hotkeys. Pretty much the only thing that stayed the same is the Windows standard F1 for help. I've been telling every Siemens guy who will listen that Microsoft Office allowed you to customize your hotkeys when I was in grade school, but we still can't do it here.

I remember maybe on version 12 that you couldn't even open the cross reference from the menu as the option didn't exist. After looking online, more people had the same complaint.

Hence my comment.
 
However, modules are usually backwards compatible. Newer FW usually is able to pretend that it is older FW, either for a CPU or an IO module. However, you may need to change the CPU setting for whether it goes into run with mismatches or not.
I think that if the IO modules are the "intelligent" kind, i.e. for loadcell or IO-link modules, the firmware must match. I actually only have had few projects with TIA so far, so I my experience is limited. But I follow the discussion on other websites and there is a general agreement that the firmware version must match to a much greater degree than in STEP7 classic.
I think I will try to make some tests when I get the time.

Btw, [rant on] to set the io modules to "startup even if mismatch", why cannot we set this as the default behaviour ? And when you want to change this setting you cannot select many modules and change the setting for all the selected modules. You have to do this one-by-one, even if that is for hundreds of modules. Thank you Siemens [rant off],
 
I remember maybe on version 12 that you couldn't even open the cross reference from the menu as the option didn't exist. After looking online, more people had the same complaint.

Hence my comment.

There may not have been a menu option for it, but I'm pretty sure it was still available in the properties area at the bottom. Granted, they aren't 100% the same thing, but it's pretty close.
 
There may not have been a menu option for it, but I'm pretty sure it was still available in the properties area at the bottom. Granted, they aren't 100% the same thing, but it's pretty close.

There was a menu option even in V11. There was just no filters and all the options.. You had to go tag by tag, ore use the one at the bottom..

V10 was really a big mistake by Siemens... So many myths around TIA are still around because they were (or weren't) there only in V10. After that, if something has changed about where it is or how to get it, people just waved their hand and automatically thought, "they still haven't implemented it"..
 
There was a menu option even in V11. There was just no filters and all the options.. You had to go tag by tag, ore use the one at the bottom..

V10 was really a big mistake by Siemens... So many myths around TIA are still around because they were (or weren't) there only in V10. After that, if something has changed about where it is or how to get it, people just waved their hand and automatically thought, "they still haven't implemented it"..

I hear ya. If your software isn't releasing with Undo/Redo buttons, it's probably best to just delay things until its ready. I don't have too many HW complaints, but on the software end, it feels like so many products/features have been released before it was really ready for prime time. Someone makes the business decision that this product is ready for 5% of the potential customers, and then they think that everyone else will just pretend the product doesn't exist until it is ready for them.
 

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