So, I expect most of the companies to buy CS. CM is free, CS is a professional lower cost software. Having a free and lower cost tool is the best that could ever happen if done properly. I mean, maybe you won't make enough profit from the boards that you designed using it to cover the 9000$. Well, regardless of any opinion, it is still very pricey. Plus, it is quite quick & easy to make your own components, both Schematic & PCB. Silicon Valley Garage on this forum also has a good array of extra components which he has kindly offered to forum members for free. I'm assuming from your comments that you have Altium ver 10, in which case you have a copy of the "frozen libraries". The problem is that the procedures & menus change with each version bump, so often their answer sheds little light on the "easiest way to do something". The Altium support team generally try & find your question in the manuals & they will quote you that verbatim. At least you are communicating with people who use Altium everyday. Dave gets more visitors to his EEVBlog website everyday than Altium do, so ask for help here instead of the Altium Forum. I'm sure there are other ways of doing this too (as it is an industry standard). If you want 3D STEP, export your existing Altium board into PCAD format & then import that into DipTrace which is pretty inexpensive. Version 13 & 14 don't offer a lot more over say version 6.9 unless you are into flex boards/high speed tuning/3D STEP design. Also, if you get it go out and find available projects in Altium so you can see how a "real" design looks in Altium.Then simply don't upgrade your Altium licence. That's better value than a lot of the classes you'll take in college/university. If I assume 3 years at $120/yr, that is a very cheap price to pay for some valuable experience(assuming you practice and use it). You don't want to have to learn the basics on the job with someone looking over your shoulder. If you learn the basics of Altium, you'll be glad you did when your employer asks about it during an interview, or you're required to use it on the job. You are much more likely to find Altium in you job later on, and since you are a student, I assume you will be going on to finding a engineering job. If you want to have a chance of importing to another package in the future you'll likely need the ASCII version, but Altium natively supports the binary.
When you create a project in Altium, be sure you save the binary and ASCII versions of the board. I think it's worth it to have experience with multiple platforms.
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