Hello, I am a Structural Engineer student at university and a novice user of Abaqus/CAE. I have been asked to create a model and perform an earthquake transient analysis in Abaqus

Therefore i have created a simple 300mmx 300mmx 3000mm long reinforced concrete column.  I want to  apply an earthquake (specifically El Centro) to the base of the column and view the results. The analysis procedure i want is a mode-based dynamic analysis using the time stepping method. 

Having gone through the Abaqus documentations and tutorials they provide I still do not understand how to apply an earthquake excitation to a structure. Once i understand how to do this i would like to apply an earthquake excitation to a more complex structure; a 3 story high frame building.

There is an example of having an earthquake excitation applied to a cantilever within the Abaqus Benchmark guide ( 1.4.13 Analysis of a cantilever subject to earthquake motion ) 

However (most likely being really dumb here) I do not understand anything within that guide. (excluding the theory side), it has given loads of files which I can not use (the CMD does not allow me to input any commands and so fetching files and jobs is not possible...again I could be completely dumb and am just miss understanding how to do this.

The CAE tutorials do not cover dynamic loading. The dynamic tutorials i found make use of  Amplifications where the data is input by the user, since El Centro data is already present in Abaqus am wondering how to apply that to a model. Also the dynamic tutorial, applied the loading on a single point as i need it to be across the entire base of the structure.

Please can somebody help me with these problems. 

In summary:

I do not understand how to conduct an earthquake excitation on a structure. Please can someone explain how to do this or link me to a tutorial (whether it is a web or a downloadable PDF) Please be detailed as I am a novice user and most likely wont understand the technical language at first.

The fetch file feature, keywords feature are a complete mystery for me and I do not understand them. A small tutorial on how to use them would be appreciated. 

Kind regards

Michael

Again I apologize if this comes across as not understanding a single thing, trying to find tutorials for Abaqus is next to impossible. Ontop of that there are no people who have Abaqus experience in my University (we use LUSAS but are beginning to change that by  trying to create detailed tutorials of common problems for future users...I was tasked with this.

Again any tutorial explaining the aforementioned problems would be immensely appreciated. Many thanks.