AutoCAD Electrical: Working With Projects

odd cast is now starting all attendees are in listen-only mode welcome everyone and thank you for attending today's webcast AutoCAD electrical working with projects our presenter today is Rick France he's a solutions engineer with Hagerman and company we're also joined on the line by Clayton Pat Miller also a solutions engineer with Hagerman and company he's gonna be helping out with questions as we go before we get started I'll let you know that you're in listening only mode if you have questions during the presentation you can type those into the question panel located on the right hand of right hand side of your screen they'll be addressed throughout by Clayton and at the end as well by Rick as we close down the session today you'll be prompted to fill out a short survey and we ask that you take a few moments to fill that out for us this webcast qualifies for one AIA continuing continuing education credit if you'd like to receive this credit you can leave your AIA number on question 4 of our survey additionally all registrants will receive a follow-up email tomorrow containing a link for the recording of this presentation with that I will hand things over to Rick all right well good morning glad you could come and let me get my screen minimized here so I can see my whole screen and basically we're gonna be talking about projects this is part one of a two-part webinar the other one will be coming up later in the month I'll give you information on that at the end part two we'll be focusing on title block setup but for this and we're going to be focusing on working with a project and just going through the various commands and things that you have available basically an AutoCAD electrical a project is a set of interrelated electrical drawings so in order for the drawings to interact for with each other they have to be in a project just to give you a short example I'm gonna I've got a project open on my screen and I'm gonna go over here to the motor starter right here on this three phase motor and I can surf and that shows me everywhere in this project on other drawings that this particular motor starter appears if I can just simply click on it go right to it'll open up the drawing and zoom in on that particular motor starter on the single phase I can then go over to the one line drawing or which is right here we'll go that one see the motor starter on my single line drawing or to the panel drawing which I believe the system right here so I'm able to surf and see because of the the product sees this motor starter as the same motor starter whether it's on a panel a point to point of the single line single-phase or three-phase drawing it understands this is all the same motor starter you cannot do that unless you have your drawings in a project that is the way the product is designed so I could set up on a drawing that was not in a project in or lated within that drawing but it's not going to be able to connect up and work with other drawings excuse me so the project itself works with what's called the project managers you see I have that opened over here on the right hand side of my screen you can activate a project you'd have only one project active at a time so if I come over here to Treadstone right-click and activate it will then let me do one other thing here I'll go ahead and do it with this drawing it will then activate another project makers make it the active one but if you notice I still have the drawing open from the one that I just closed so here's a habit you want to get into because if I was to go and just delete this footprint on this particular drawing there is an Access database working in the background so what happens is when I deleted it from this drawing it did not update the access at abase for the project that this drawing is incorrectly it would have that updated some of the information but it wouldn't update the all of it and so this particular device could still be in a Billa material it could still be in a schematic list it could still be in the project even though I deleted it from this drawing and it had no effect on the current project because the drawing doesn't belong to that project so it's a good habit to always close your drawings when you from the old project when you open up one in a different open up a different project now there's no problem opening up drawings from other projects so that you can copy circuits or copies some type of footprint or component that's in it into and from one project to another but you don't want to make editing changes because of that access database that is working in the background for each individual project now when you go into a project there are certain files this I'm looking at it from Windows right now there are certain files that go with each project one of them is the WBP file which is right here every project has one you see WD a lot in the praten in the program because this software when it was first created was actually called wire diagram and it was made by via out of this bottom out sometime in the early 2000s and produced AutoCAD electrical but all these WD files that's where they come from and this particular one is wdp now the wdp file contains things such as you're drawing paths within the project where they're located on your computer as far as the file path that is stored in the wdp file if you have any type of folder structure so you can see here in this Treadstone I've got five folders that folder structure is also stored in the wdp file in addition if I went to the drawing properties for a particular drawing in the drawing in the project these descriptions in the section and subsection all of that is stored in that wdp file I don't know if you've noticed before but if you've ever tried to copy a drawing from one project to another it loses the descriptions in those sections and subsections that's because that information is stored in the wtp file not in the drawing so that information is also stored in there in addition any project settings so settings such as your ladder with your spacing setup anything you see here any of this information what styles of arrows are using PLC styles your loop your dot your numbering system for your wire numbers and your cross reference and your components how you're gonna do the item number amend your project all of this information is stored in that wdp file so it's a pretty important file that you don't want to mess with you can actually open it up in notepad or and and make changes to it but if you don't know what you're doing you're gonna screw up the whole project so I always advise people don't mess with it just let the software manage itself in addition there's a product there's a file up here the a EPX file this is another file that is automatically maintained by the software don't try to edit it don't try to delete it just leave it along with the software manage this particular one now the nice thing about this one is if you ever accidentally deleted it it will automatically create it back again once you've changed out of the project and back in so I'm going to go ahead I deleted to activate it I'll go right back to the project and you can see it recreated that file so that one if it ever accidentally gets deleted is will recreate automatically but don't try to edit it because you can mess up the entire project so those are a couple of files that go with every project that you need to know about now what I want to show you some other support files that I particularly think is very very nice to maintain I keep them in a folder called support under my company data we're not gonna go through all these files today but we're gonna take a look at a couple of them these two I've never seen much information about it's a default installation and default location code basically it's just default dot IMS T it's just an ASCII file and you can put in there different things to keep everybody using the same installation codes the same location codes throughout throughout every project and keep everybody using the same verbage how these work as if I was to go to the project right-click on a component you can see I don't have an installation location code if I use the project tab here you'll see down here include external lists because this was one on my sub panel right I don't have that on here I could just select an include external list and there's everything in the list that was not included in the project already select it I could use that information now this checkbox has to be activated every that's as once every drawing session once I close AutoCAD it goes back off but here you can see I've got the same information that was in that file so what I update the drawing I'm just gonna go ahead and let it go through and and do the update it will use that file without those same files are available from a project my drawing properties so if I come over here to drawing properties see here I've got an installation location code that I can set for the drawing a hit project notice it's already checked so I could select from it and use that same information keeps everybody consistent using the same information but those are just two files that I particularly think it's pretty valuable when I'm doing work the wdt + WD title file here this has to do with your title block in your descriptions we're gonna cover those in part two so we're not going to touch those today we're going to cover those in part two a couple of other ones that I think are important is to get is to develop a good description file that works for your company that way everybody is using the same description and what this particular one deals with is if I came in here let me let me just got a model space here that'd be a little bit easier go to edit component and that's the file we're looking at here this is the WD description WD D this is another one just like that default location installation that I found very valuable to keep working to keep up-to-date and keep everybody using the same terminology throughout every project one other one that people probably don't know a lot about this is WD underscore fam for family dot dat this allows you where if your standards are different than what they use for family codes for instance out of the box they use PW for power supplies I prefer PS they use em for motor starter and I prefer EMS so I can sit in this file it's basically a pointer to wherever it uses PW comma I want it to use PS and you can see here I've added to this file a motif for motor that I want to change to MTR and while in this particular project already it's using the ps4 the power supplies and if you looked at the motor starter it's using the MS I purposely have not updated or II tagged this particular project so that the motors are still MOT as they are out of the box and so later on we'll come back to that and you'll see how that file works because it basically works when you do the update retag oil it'll work as you're adding objects also little side note on that particular file if you edit it you have to close AutoCAD and reopen it it only loads one time when you first open on a cat so I went ahead and made the change so that I was ready to go in here I'd save our way in it yep lastly well all the other thing you seen here is there's a lisp routine and I'm going to show you what what I let that set up the it's only in there so I can show you how you can make it execute on every drawing now the way this product works out of the box there are some settings I'm gonna go to the project here right click on it and you'll see these settings this is the settings that I've changed them to but basically this is the WD E and V file the wire diagram environment file it gets loaded every time you open up AutoCAD electrical and there's a lot of things you can do here that will be time savers in using this file everything that's been set out that I've changed in there is in the in here it so it's not exactly out of the box but the main one in my opinion is this a cat path first which I have activated and turned on so let me explain what how AutoCAD electrical finds but it's looking for out of the box if this was turned off when it's looking for something the first place it's gonna look it's the project settings here let me close this I'm gonna go to draw project properties first place it's gonna look is the schematic libraries here in the panel footprint libraries here however you have it set up so this is where it looks first the second place it looks are the settings that are in that environment file so if it can't find what it's looking for excuse me the next place that's going to look are these settings right here which are coming from the environment file the third place it will look are the options here an autocad for the support file search path I personally like to reverse that sequence so by setting a cat path first one it reverses the sequence so the first place it looks is here the second place is that environment file and the third place is the project properties I found a lot of value and reversing that process and I'm just gonna point out a couple of them here at this time so the first thing I'm gonna do is this particular project come in right now and was set up in 2015 I no longer have 2015 on my computer so if I came up here to the icon menu and I tried to put a push button on this drawing it can't find it has no idea where that push button is because since it's been reversed they still can't find it wouldn't find it in my stuff because I wouldn't have the push button but you can see that down here it is looking for 2015 normally if you I would never reversed it this would be up top and all this information down here would be at the bottom now this has nothing to do with the sequence here that they can't find it it can't find it simply because the libraries on this particular project are set to 2015 if I still had 2015 on my computer it would find the 2015 data and it would have used it but it would have been the 2015 data not the 2018 but most people when they hit this issue it's because they've upgraded from an older version to a new version and they've removed that older version off their computer so here's one of the reasons I like to a cat path first if I come here to the properties of this project I'll open up schematic libraries a lot of YouTube videos articles out there that you'll read will tell you when you have customization to add your customization locations to this point each project like this the downside to that is you have to have it in each project by setting the 1/10 path first to have having my support path up here the mana CAD I can put that in AutoCAD and I only have to have it in one place I no longer have to have it in my preach and every project here's where it comes into play this is set to 2015 I need to update this project for 2018 so I'm gonna hit default right here that will upgrade my past the 2018 but notice what it did it removed all my custom paths so they are no longer there in the project settings now I could fix that in that wire and that W D and V file by going in there and adding my custom paths but I'm gonna have to do that it's not the easiest thing to do well that way it's it's a lot harder to do that than it is to add it up here and just simply set that a cat path first now just because I did the schematic libraries does not update the panel footprints so I'm gonna go back to panel footprints hit default you see those three custom categories or locations they're gone so that's one reason I use the a cat path first so I can always just come in here hit default and be done with it and I don't have to go to each project and make sure that they have all the correct paths for any customization I've done because I'm a big proponent of keeping all my customization separate from what's out of the box and I do that by using these paths so that updated this particular one this is something you'll probably his--and or later that you need to come in here and hit that default button it needs to be done on each library just select the actual library hit default select the panel footprint library hit default and you're basically have upgraded this one and it's gonna be able to find everything now so now if I came in here and did that push button again no problem it found it exactly where it was supposed to be located in the 2018 path so that's kind of one of the things the task you have to do when you upgrade from one version to the others to get those libraries and they need existing projects set up now what happens here by setting up my options here where I have my support pass of all my customization here I can do that in a deployment I can do that on each individual machine however you want to set set that up but I can add these paths in a deployment do it one time install it on a hundred machines and everybody gets that so this in my opinion is the best place to put those pass to your customization you can see I've got some catalog circuits library reports and support the one rule you need to know here is the name of your library file let me go back here notice in the drawing properties here they call their default libraries Li BS that name is off limit so I can't name my custom library files I live in a folder called Li B yes because as soon as I do that it will mess this up so basically you want to make sure that these are li BS and your custom one folder needs to be something else I use the name library but you can't use the IPS but here in the support files search path I basically add all my custom files and I move them to the top of the food chain because the way AutoCAD electrical and AutoCAD works is it always search it'll search here if it can't find it it starts through here it doesn't instantaneously you saw how fast it clicked up that's going to search in sequence down through here go the environment file searching sequence there go to the project properties search and sequence there it happens in a blink of an eye but that's the way it goes so I always put my custom stuff in the top of the food chain right here so it's the first thing that gets searched that way if I ever change a symbol such as I use a fuse this fuse here I believe it's this fuse it may be this fuse here one of these two out of the box I think it's this one here on the left out of the box the fuse has no description so I have my own fuse that has the description on it so that I could put in the description information here and I named it the exact same thing I just put it in my library which is at the top of the food chain so when I place it from that icon menu it finds it places it we're good to go so that's just a couple of reasons why I like to use that egghead path first now let me show you where the egg the W de and B file is on your computer if you go to my documents you'll see a folder a caddy 2018 since I'm in 2018 and under there you'll see a folder called AE data inside that folder is your W D D and V file when I was a CAD manager I would just remove this and delete it from everybody's computer because I wanted one W DMV file that everyone was using so that I didn't have to maintain 50 of them now mine I just renamed it to dot bak you can do either one rename it or delete it either way as long as you have a W D and V file in your path the important part here is this got to be in the path up here so if you do as I do here that's the one that's gonna use it's on my network drive so everyone in the company is using the same exact w di EMV file no one has it on their local computer it's all here on the network looking at this file this is the out of the box file with no changes made in the in the basics of it like the paths and AutoCAD support paths and things this is a top-to-bottom read file so what I do instead of coming through here and searching for stuff that I want to change and customize I just go to the bottom of the file I set up a section here for my company where I set up anything that I'm gonna change so no matter what they have it set up above this one wins because it's at the bottom of the file so these are a few settings that I've found very useful to set in the W D and V file and when I go from one version to another I just take the new W D and V file I copy this out of my old one paste it in the new one and I'm save it and I'm good to go so that way I make sure if they made any changes or add anything to this file I don't lose anything it was added in the new version but I still have my settings working for the old working for my product from this but from that point forward so the first thing I set in here is they kept path first I set that to one right here you'll see there are three project settings the first one the WD project basically sets tells the software where your location of your projects are gonna be saved I'm saving them on my network drive in a folder called projects notice that the slash is backwards to windows the reason being is because because this is read by a lisp routine and the backward slash and Lisp means something and so you have to use a forward slash and Lisp to make it read a direct folder or directory structure now I could also do this with double slashes like that so I could either way would work double slash but a double backward slash or a single forward slash both of those will work with it within this file I've just always used the forward slash also you'll notice this in quotes this particular one right here would need to be in quotes cuz there's no spaces but right here I've got spaces so that's why I has to be in quotes my habit is just to put a always in quotes so that I'm never have to worry about it but that just has to do with the space here and the folder name company data now this one here again tells it where I'm saving my product so when I create a new project it knows exactly where the projects are going to be this one I here is for a project dialog box so that it will default to the project's folder and this one is a save to file dialog box so it will default to the project so this is basically three different dialog boxes I'm having to tell where my projects are in this particular file this one right here is the location of my custom report set files so that it knows where it is and when location to where when I'm man that when I'm setup any custom reports it saves as a set file everybody in the company is looking at the same folder and I only have to do it one time otherwise it's looking on your local computer this one right here these next to this is telling it where to browse when I'm in a icon menu for either a schematic symbol or a footprint simple so basically what this one is doing I'll go ahead show you this I'm on schematic icon menu if I hit this browse button right here it's going directly to my custom folder I'm keeping all my customization because generally if I'm browsing I'm not browsing for something out of the box it's already in the icon menu I want to be browsing for something I did custom so I have it that this one browse button for the schematics going to that folder and if I go to the panel icon menu browse it's going to the same folder because I keep both my footprints and my schematic symbols in the same folder so basically that's what these two are doing this one right here is for the W block command in the symbol builder so if you go to the symbol builder and you're gonna W block right block your symbol out this tells it that command where you're going to be saving those particular symbols they're in the same location but it's again it's three different dialog boxes so I had to define three different locations there these two here are for the circuits this one's for the insert insert circuit dialog box this is for the user circuit dialog box so I'm just going to show you one of them if I came here and hit insert W block circuit it goes straight to my custom circuit folder the other one is for the use of is for when you're creating circuits so just a few of them there that I found very handy to set up so that it saves you from having to browse to things because I could set them up in this WD + V file where it automatically goes there those dialog boxes so these really have less to do with my search path here and more to do with the dialog boxes that are already built into AutoCAD electrical the last two here are just a couple of them I like this one right here I'm sure if you've never used the product you've gotten a message that says do you want a Q save yes no okay no always Q say if I happen to get one just a minute ago this does not get rid of every Q save in the world but it seems to get rid of a majority of them so used to ice I used to say that always Q saves dialog box 20 30 times a day when I was working an eight-hour day in the product by setting this particular variable here in my W DMV file I cut it down to fewer than 10 a day so it was a big difference in what it would made some of the some of the commands evidently ignores this particular one another thing I've noticed in 2018 is this seems to load in my initial project if I change to a different project here by activating it that also seems to be disconnected nothing that's just a little small error they need to correct and haven't yet to do that but that's a another thing I've noticed in 2018 but this will still save you a lot of those always Q safe box Tata box this right here is a setup to where when I open a drawings if I hit previous or next turning to other type of AutoCAD electrical open drawing command it will load that particular Lisp routine so that's the only reason I have that particular list per team right here which works with a lisp and a script is because I wanted to show you you could set up a predefined list routine that it will load every time you open a drawing to do this particular task if you need it to you can do that with this WD open drawing command so these are kind of my favorites I'm not gonna go through every command that's in the WD and B file it's pretty in-depth you can probably find something online that will go a lot deeper than what I have but these are kind of my favorites that I like to use and set up and I've been setting it up this way for years and years and just copy that forward I'm not gonna save it but that's the WD n V file W D and V file just loaded one time when you first open AutoCAD electrical if you make a change to that file you basically have to close out of cut electrical and reopen it for that change to take place alright so a couple of things here let me make sure okay I wanted to switch here now to the NFPA demo activate that one I'm gonna open up a new drawing I just opened up a blank drawing most these commands will not work most these come in none of these commands will work if you do not have a drawing open so sometimes I'll just open up an AutoCAD drawing that's not even electrical drawing just to be able to use some of the commands so first I want to show you three different methods for creating a new project in the project manager you can create a new project by selecting new project right here you can also do it in the drop down here and you'll see new project right there a couple more clicks so I usually use this one here now for this one I'm gonna just call it Acme notice the location that's because I set that my W D and V file I don't have to worry about browsing because it's going to right to my project location on my network because that was why I was set in the W D and V file also I like to create a folder so it's actually gonna create a folder under there for at for my project and create the WGP file based on my name up here now this one I'm gonna blank out the copy settings from project file the reason I'm doing that if you don't have anything selected here then whatever your active project is that's the settings it's gonna copy so I purple that's why I changed the nfpa demo so this would copy those settings just to be able to show you now I'm gonna come back to these life next two buttons after we do the this one cuz this was just to show you that when I create it you can see here if I go to the project properties it's got the same settings if you've ever opened up that NFPA demo as an FPA demo so it's a duplicate of that particular project so your active project is the one it copies not what I want so I'm gonna go ahead and create another project I want this one to be called I forget what some call Starlin so this is gonna be Starling I'm gonna create the folder but this one I am gonna browse and copy Treadstone so this one's going to copy the settings from the Treadstone project now the descriptions button here again this is gonna be covered more detailed of how I set this up in part two when we're working with Tata box but for now good habit to get into when you're gonna create a new project is to go to the descriptive you're creating it this way it's to go to the descriptions right here and go ahead and fill it out so this is gonna be 36:51 my clients gonna be Starling enterprises now if you notice I am typing in all caps this is information that's gonna be used in my title block it'll just call waste incinerator so because of that I want it to be caps in my title block I've got to type it in caps here because if you type it in lowercase here it'll be lowercase in your title block you cannot control that separately if you want to include in any report any of this information and reports you would check it here does not automatically put it in the reports but at least it's available to put in a report if you want to but you want to fill out these description since these are gonna be tied back to the title block and again we'll go into more detail on that in part two I'm gonna go ahead and say okay properties and what that will do is create the project and go to the properties without me having to select it in there and you can see here it's mimicking the other product remember the other project was 4.5 and 3/4 used different arrow styles it uses a different PLC style also the numbering convention of NFPA DMO is percent s for Wired or percent in for wiring numbers same with components as percent f % F so it copied all the settings from Treadstone to this one so I'm not reinventing the wheel constantly now the downside to creating it this way the upside to me personally is the fact that it goes straight to this location and it creates the project name and and folder for me that's the upside to it but the downside is notice it did not copy any of the folder structure did not copy any drawings which I didn't want it to copy drawings but it would have been nice to have this folder structure copied but unfortunately this particular command does not do that but it gives me an example to be able to show you how to add a subfolder to your projects I'll go Starlin here and right click on it you'll see add subfolder so you can do subfolders for whatever you want to let's say I'm going to do a different than the other projects this is gonna be my feed system this is going to be my incineration system and we'll do one more for the boiler system another thing you can do is subfolders so let's say under incineration system I wanted a cooling system so I could have a subfolder under there that's just gonna be my cooling another subfolder for something else all system or something but basically you can have subfolders under these with subfolders of subfolders so you can create whatever folder structure you want to the thing to realize here is this is a folder structure for AutoCAD electrical this is not equivalent to a folder structure in Windows just like here in Treadstone down here you see I've got five folders if I go to Treadstone in my projects I don't have any folders here likewise when I created this one for Starlin there's no folders it's got the two files I pointed out earlier but there's no folders that's just the way the software works I used to go to Windows and create equivalent folders when they first came out with this but then every time I started a new drawing I would have to browse and make sure I'm putting it in the right location in the right folder and I found it was a lot more work than it was worth because I found no benefit in it the product works best with all the drawings in the same folder but it will work with them in separate folders it's just harder to manage because I'm constantly having to change folders so I've gave up on that a long time ago just because I found it to be a little bit of a hassle that was unnecessary now let's say you've got a folder system that you don't want you can right-click on the project and you'll see flat and structure and it basically removes the entire folder system and I could do that even on an existing one right-click flat in the structure on this in FBA demo one it's got to be the active project let me go ahead make it the active one flatten the structure it got rid of the the folder structure of that particular project had no effect on the drawings whatsoever because they're all in one folder anyways so you don't have to use folders but they do come in handy and that's why I like myself and you'll see that in a minute when I start showing you some of the things that the benefits of the folders but like I said no folder structure no drawings most the time when I create a project I want drawings from another projects because it's usually gonna be somewhat similar to an existing project a lot of times that first project I created I'm gonna have to get a little more work to get it but let's say I want a copy of Treadstone as is it's for a brand new project that I'm doing for another client for that I could come over here to the project tab right here on my ribbon menu now a couple of things before we even do this part I'm gonna go ahead and show you I don't have to keep every project open I can only only have to have the project's I want open to be able to see so for instance of starling is not a project I'm working on and this is every every prior you could have multiple people in your company using AutoCAD electrical one person could be seen project 1 Project 2 and project 3 and another person could be seeing project - project 5 and project 7 and so on and so on this is unique to each person's computer what they have open but if you have projects you don't want to see you simply right-click and close it so I could come through here and close out each one that I have here that I don't want or that I don't need I'm just gonna close out all three of them now right if I ever accidentally and we have to move this dialog box close my project manager over here on the ribbon menu hit manager it'll open it back up before I do the copy project I just want to cover two more buttons here cuz we're not going to cover everything on this ribbon menu that so some of us not really related to what we're doing today or most of it's not but the delete project I want to show you that one basically hit delete go locate your project wdp file it open I'm gonna delete the wdp file I'm gonna delete the project drawings select lis files that deletes the project personally I don't use this command here's why but I had wanted to show it to you because it gets asked about every now and then I come back here you can see it left the folder behind and that left some residual files that were part of that folder so it didn't delete everything except for the W deep file and the drawings so normally what I want to delete a project I just come in here and sit in Windows I close it over here and my project manager cuz it's best to close it and then I just go to Windows and simply delete the folder I doesn't want to right now because it was probably got something still holding that but you delete the folder it would get rid of everything that way it seems it's the same thing but cleaner than just using the delete file the one here you also have a zip one mine won't do anything because I don't have it assigned to anything but you can go in your WT envy file and tell it what's if you're using something like WinZip or some other type of zip for program other than the one that comes with woods up windows you can set it up here and you can zip a folder I usually just go and sip it with Windows so I haven't used that particular command in years as a result but I just wanted to touch I'm gonna let you know about them let's see I closed Minas Tirith and I didn't mean to do that so right here you'll see an open project so I'm gonna go ahead and hit open click back find the wdp file it opened makes it the active project so just like anything else just like closing it you can open them it's also located under here that drop-down but in this particular instance I want to create a new project so I'm going to come up here to copy this command his is a great command I only have one thing I don't like about it I'll put that in a minute it's just a pet peeve of mine but the one rule here is if whatever project your copy no one can have any drawings open because with this command your drawing you're going to be copying folder structure and drawings as well so if anyone has a drawing open in that project this command will bomb out so you have to make sure no one's in the project before you run this particular copy command now if I wanted to copy Minas Tirith I could hit copy active project in this case I want to browse and get Treadstone cuz that's the one I'm going to copy and it's just getting that wdp file I know no one's in the project by the way you can look at that click on the drawings and it will tell you if someone's got that particular drawing open so you can kind of check them out if you need to ahead of time we'll hit OK this is what I don't like about the command it doesn't automatically create and create your folder or your project name so if I come back here I have to create a folder for it in this particular case I'm gonna create a folder and name it Arkham we'll go inside of Arkham it will create the file name so I had to create the folder and I had to type my project name twice as a result but that's the only that's just a pet peeve of mine like it should be able to just do it like the other command and create the folder and everything and only have to type it once but unfortunately that one doesn't so here I could pick which drawing so if I wanted to just get the schematic diagrams I could come in here and select those and say process just the same way you do with anything else when you see this particular dialog box I'm going to do all to get all the drawings and hit okay now this right here is for custom files that belong to a particular project if you remember and if NFP a demo that one when I deleted it left a couple old files behind it was these type of files matter of fact the two it left behind were these two if those files are exist in a project that you're copying these would not be grayed out and you could just make a decision do you want to copy them or not the way I use the software is I use everything in a global setting we'll talk about that in part two so I used one title block with a global setting so I don't usually have custom files for a particular job now sometimes I have clients who want that and so I'll do it for that particular client but normally I'm using one title block everything's in my support folder inside so I may be using these files like the location of installation phone files I was showing you earlier but they're global for all projects not an individual project that's what this dialog box is dealing with so in this case I could just say okay this is what I love about this command I'm used to seeing the project number as part of my file name the project I'm copying happens to be project 36 47 so I want to change this to this project which is going to be a different number of 36 62 will say I can use the find and replace right here until it everywhere you see 36 47 change that to 36 62 you know Kane you can see it's remembered or renamed all my files I can edit each one individually with the Edit command here if I needed to but generally I'm set up to where all I have to do is say change it from this project number in the file name to another project number if you don't have anything unique in every project like a project number you wouldn't even have to do this but come me I came from we actually included project numbers and every filename and this made it real simple to be able to change these from one project to another so let's select okay it creates the project activates it as the current project and as you can see it also opened up a drawing got the entire folder structure and all the file names have been renamed from 36 47 to 36 62 it's an exact duplicate of Treadstone doing it this way and I didn't have to go through each one individually and rename the files and stuff or copy or an atom individually here's the thing to remember with this one as you see in my title block down here it's still got all the information from Treadstone so right click on the project and you'll see descriptions same description box we saw earlier and the other command this one we just had to remember to right-click and go get to it that way I could have done that on the other project too if I would have skipped it I could have went mad at these later notice this one copied watt reports we're going to be which ones we're going to be using reports from the existing project also but in this case we'll change this to 36 62 I'm going to keep it simple here we'll say it's Arkham chemicals and it's gonna be a latex processing plan that's in Gotham City of course that's where art would be we'll go ahead and change the initials of the check by which is my engineer so to correct all your descriptions hit OK again doesn't update the title blocks instantly but it will in a minute when we get a little bit further first thing I want to do here those show you how to add a new drawing just in case you don't know how to new drawing is this button right here I'm going to add a new drawing the name of this one is going to be 36 62 - 100 - zero widens I'm gonna use my reports template which is the same one I have here but it's set up because I said my options up there where my template files would be located and I'm using the reports one here and then we're gonna go ahead and say this is a cover sheet and the description of this be legend and we'll say drawing list again I'm typing in all caps for the same reason as before so that'll be in all caps when I do it I'm not gonna use the location code consists for the entire project but this is gonna be sheet number one and it will be drawing a 100 no section or subsection again consists for the entire project so I'll say okay when I apply the project defaults to it so that it gets all the same settings that were in the project - at to begin with I happen to be on - incineration system evidently I don't know how that happened I will get rid of that here I must have been setting on incineration system I don't know where that came from that's a first I want this one to be my first drawing though in the project so I'm gonna drop it up there we'll go ahead and delete this remove that subfolder there but that way it goes up to the top because if it is at the bottom then that is weird if I was doing the next excuse me if I was on I see one here it's gonna go through these when I hit previous and next that way but if it's at the top that's my sequence I want so I'm gonna place it up there now right now I have two she once if I looked here to this sheet one of 16 I got my next drawing that one's also she one but is she one of 15 cuz this one doesn't realize I've updated added a drawing yet we'll cover that in a minute but for now I've created the drawing it's my cover sheet and it's gonna be legend of drawing list we'll come back to this one a little bit later first I want to show you some different tools the other tools that are here I'm gonna go ahead and expand all the right-click and so there's every drawing that's in this particular project all nice and expanded another thing here I haven't found much use for this but they have to show you as I can flip the name drawing name to uppercase and it shows it an uppercase did not remain the drawings is just showing me here an uppercase right click again I can flip them back to lowercase again it's not gonna rename the drawings but some people like to see things in upper and lower case so you have that ability and at any time you can always just collapse all to collapse everything I'm gonna leave everything expanded for a little while since we're gonna be dealing with this now those drawing names don't mean a lot to me doesn't tell me which ones a plc which ones an air fan I can't really tell which is it operator station one operator station two I can't see that information just by filename so I like to see a bit more information and I can do that with the drawing list configure display configuration right here this again is machine dependent so one person could be looking at a project with file names and another person could be looking at it with descriptions another person could be looking at with sheet numbers each person can look at the same project however they want to I'm gonna remove the file name I like to see things by location so I'm gonna go ahead and put the location code in there I like to see my sheet numbers and I like to see a description now I used for description one my folder name for description too I use the locations I just so I don't really need it because I have that with the location code and for description 3 it's always unique so that's the one I'm gonna use you know ok and now you can see I can see exactly where everything is in my project which which ones using which operator station my sheet numbers and a description of what it is to me it's a little bit easier to find what I'm looking for filenames still there it's just I'm looking at it differently in my project manager to me that's pretty valuable this is the way I generally do it now when I add a drawing that's not here notice there's a sheet 9 if I go over here to tread stone that's all there was was sheet 9 but over here in Minas Tirith there's a tenth sheet and I want that tenth sheet right there the way you copy a drawing from one project to another first you want to do it in Windows because I don't want to add it using to go in here and add it when it's in another project because then that drawings gonna belong to two different projects so I don't need a copy of it first I'm gonna go here to Minas Tirith here's that drawing 1 1 a 1 10 10 sheet 10 I'm gonna make a copy of it from the back to Arkham and we'll paste it in there once I've copied it in windows all I have to do now if I want it to be in a particular folder that I need to right click on that folder to add it I'm gonna had it's a schematic diagram so on the right click add drawings locate that drawing I just copied which is this one at the top 36 32 u 1 1 0 10 so what I had that one apply this one's project defaults it just saw that I had some terminal blocks in there that are duplicate so this will rename them to where they're not duplicates and you can see it added it here at the bottom but notice there's no description remember I told you descriptions are stored inside the wdp file about inside the drawing so for this particular one I'm gonna go ahead and close this drawing first I want to rename it I can't have it open to rename it because it remember this one's a different project number so I'm gonna right-click on it do rename and I'm going to change it from 36 32 to 36 62 so I don't see the rename there but I do see it down here because of the way I'm looking at it next I'm gonna go ahead and open it because when I did a drawing properties here some of this information I can get from the drop down I can get that this is schematic diagram I can get from here that it's a operator station - you can see it kept the location code but this information here did not come over from the other project because they're in the other project wdp file description 3 though is unique I don't have anything in the drop-down that matches the description 3 so I can use this pick button right here and just simply pick description 3 and my title block and it copied it into my description here so I didn't have to retype anything and I could have done that for all three of these actually for section though this is area 51 subsection B once I've got that set in ok it updated my project manager with the information from the description 3 I'm good to go now I have it updated my title block yep but we're gonna get there here in just a minute first thing I want to do well actually we're ready to update the title block but I'm gonna use a different command I love update retag right here it's on the project manager it's on the project tab with update read tag I'm gonna here schematic notice one thing here my sheet numbers I need to fix those now I can fix that with the title block update fixing those sheet numbers well also let's go back to sheet 1 close that one open here because this is gonna become sheet 2 because I'm using a percent s percent in code it's going to fix this from sheet 1 to sheet 2 so it's also that I want to read number all my components why our numbers everything's gonna be affected by the sheet number change now I could do that a couple of different ways I could do it manually but I want to use a tree tag to update retag does a couple of things it's doing a componentry tag just like this command here it's updating the rock cross references like that command it's gonna update my wire numbers like look you know what wire numbers are right there so forget that one subscribe date my wire numbers I don't need it to do a Latin reference because I the way I'm doing % s % and it will update that automatically when it remembers my sheets because it's gonna go through and remember my sheets in sequence here so this will be 1 2 3 4 and so on and it will do that first and then do all the retaking and stuff and lastly my title block update once you've got your title block update setup here done which is in part 2 and you've got everything here set up the way you want it which is basically my project settings already it's as simple as just you know J do all ok and it's going to go through the entire project and update everything and when command so I don't have to use each of those 4 or 5 different individual commands I have them all in one command with this update retag now this will take a couple of minutes for it to do an odd couple minutes but it'll take 30 to 45 seconds probably so while it's doing that let's actually yeah while it's doing that let's talk about a couple of things that are coming up here in a minute one of the things that will happen when it finishes updating this is you'll notice my project manager will not update with those sheet numbers this will still show me a sheet 1 sheet 1 sheet 2 and so on that won't update just because I did an update retag fortunately I have a command called refresh which is right up here I'm not sure if I'll go ahead and try it right there so when it finishes here in just a minute son sheet 13 right now if 17 I'll be able to hit that refresh Nell update by project manager with all the different changes so it's almost finished it looks like and I think it's not now so if I hit refresh now you can see sheet one two three four and so on so I remembered everything if I look at this particular drawing let me regen it come over here and now you can see everything is updated my ladders up to 204 205 so the sheets updated there's my eye I'm bringing up my components my wire numbers everything updated as it was supposed to based on that update retag as you can see update retag tada block update they're both here let's see last let's go over here to last but we're almost done here let's go here to this drawing here and I just want to show you one thing here I'm gonna go ahead and edit the location box browse this is all gonna be sub are yes scan right task this is also controlled in the project manager whenever you have something that you don't I don't want it to go through each one of these individually and update and then update the rest of the project I can't ask it with that you have a task list right here this was grayed out before but now it's showing up as a task list here when I do that one it'll go through everything that is in that task list select all hit ok and now it's gonna go through the entire drawing an update every to all those changes I just made so let me give you a little advice of the task list this is not something that you want to have building all day long because what can happen is if I edit a component let's say I changed this control relay here and I saved it to the task list and then later on today I came in here and made another change to this and changed it from the first time I changed installation code second time I changed my description what will happen is it'll go through and it might change the description it might change the installation goat here but here and well it says change the description here and then it hit this task and it's gonna overwrite this one and change it right back because they're in - it's the same piece and the task list the way you want to do the task list is when you do a bunch of commands and you've that you're doing run the task list then come back and add to the task list run it again don't let it build all day because if you double edit the same component one of them will overwrite the other one and you could get results that you didn't expect so always run that task list several times in the days make sure you don't do that I usually run it after I do something like I just did I've changed a bunch of insulation codes once I'm done with that run the task list change some descriptions run the task list do it that way don't double up stuff so that's my advice on that I also have some different things in here to where you can sort let's say I'm gonna jump this whoops I'm gonna pull this and I have to do to move something is just left-click and hold I can move it if I wanted to correct that sorting there right click and I could sort by let's say section subsection file path name however you want to and notice it sorted it back into the sequence is supposed to be so if you move something you can use that sort if you have a drawing you don't need you can always right-click and remove that will remove it from the project but it will not delete the drawing it's still there if I come over here and look somewhere in here there's a sheet in there's that drawing is still there I just removed it from the project lastly or not lastly I got two more things here to show you before we go to the PDFs which will be the conclusion one of the commands that I like a lot is if I right-click here you'll see exception list this will tell me any drawings that are in my project that are not set to match the project defaults you can see here she's six seven eight nine all are not matching the project defaults if I went and looked at one of those we'll look at she's six here actually we'll look at this one if I look at this one here and go to the drawing properties see the drawing formats four and a half inch ladder not 8 inch ladder the cross-referencing is doing percent in instead of percent yes so that one got the wrong numbers completely because I'm using percent s % in so I'd have to update retag anyways because of that one but what you can do and this is where the folders come in handy is I can right click on schematic diagram and apply of project defaults to that entire folder I don't have to pick each one individually I can do the entire folder the reason I like to do that that way notice when I go back to my exception list now there's still one drawing that is not matching my project defaults and that's my single line diagram why these are vertical ladders this is a horizontal ladder I don't want to match my project defaults because the ladders are dark made differently so the folder protects my single line diagrams from me accidentally applying the project defaults to everything in the project you want to get in the habit of making sure all your drawings have the right project defaults because again if I come here my ladders 702 but notice my circuit breakers 0 seed circuit breaker 0 5a because I did not have the project defaults applied to this particular one I forgot to show you MTR and Savi MOT that was because of that WD family that lastly for the drawing list here before we go to the PDS let me go in here I'm gonna go ahead and close some drawings here also I'm not gonna bother fixing the ones right now because it's not necessary for here for this particular webinar but what I do want to show you is one more tool here under the project name you right-click and you'll see drawing list report we went through all these but published so far and that includes these up here drawing list report I'm gonna pick one that I already have in the oven and my set files in my drawing set files which it's going to the company data because of what was set in the WD and V file will do a new report and I'm just gonna go ahead and do all of them and here is my drawing list report for this project now and I'm gonna put it on the drawing I'm gonna use my table that I like I'm gonna give it a title of drawing list and I'm gonna put it on the annotation layer everything else I'm going to take the defaults to you know kay and there's my drawing list report coming from the project notice everything's not centered that's what that list 14 I have set for it does if I want it to another drawing and back again that's the quickest way that lisper team will fix it when it opens that drawing so that it fixed my headers and everything so that's what my little is 14 was for that was also coming from the W D and V file but that's some of the things you can do with the project the only the other thing I want to make sure you you can see here is publishing a project and publishing a project to a PDF is very nice with AutoCAD electrical because it will remember those links so I'm gonna go up here where it says publish I can also right click and do it from there but right here on this menu right here you'll see published PDF Word wif I'm gonna publish to everything in this project using the first layout tab it's gonna go to a multi sheet PDF this is where the magic is done right here I'm gonna include the bookmarks and parent-child hyperlinks zoom factor set to 50 that's just what percentage it will zoom on when I do those hyperlinks so it has to be a multi sheet PDF file you have to include bookmarks and parent-child hyperlinks if you want to make these intelligent PDFs that are surfable go ahead and say okay close it once you get to this window we can just hit publish and I want to save it right there and my root folder and now I'm not gonna save the current list so just take a second here to go through because I did not do it in the background my personal preference is not to use the background because I've I haven't checked it in 2018 but in earlier versions when they added the hyperlinks they tended not to work quite as well when I published them in the Ford right in the background so I've gotten the habit of doing my PDS in the background and in the foreground once it's complete here so I'm opening up the PDF file we'll come over here to sheet 2 I'll zoom in a little bit where I can see it and as you see I've got the hand here so I'll just click that motor starter takes me right back over here if I click it right there let's be right back to sheet 1 or I can go to the auxilary 1 here take it right back to the motor starter click this motor starter takes me to the panel click the panel footprint takes me right back to the motor starter if I come down here to the single line diagram just down to here around this one will pan over a little bit there's that same motor starter click it takes me right back to the motor starter here on the PDF so the PDF has intelligent surfing links built into it I went a little longer than I meant to that's why I was kind of rushing there at the end but there's going to be a part two that's going to happen on March 27th it's gonna be working with Tata blocks a little bit less information to cover so it shouldn't take as long as we just did it should only take about 45 minutes or so and that will cover how to set up those Tata blocks within your project and within the entire width within all projects or within a project you can set it up either way and we'll go over all the different things here you can sign up for this on Herman dot-com and now we'll let Clayton tell me if I have any questions I need to answer no questions well you guys were a quiet group all right if you do have any questions you can contact us at Agra man and I will try to answer those offline if you need to that concludes what I have and I will turn it back over to Ashley looks like one question just came in let me see if I can see that can I can't read them i screen for some reason so maybe Clayton if you could read that to me I can't get it to blow up yes we have one customer asking if you have a copy of the lisper team yes I do actually give it when you take training from it's usually included in my training and stuff I send me an email I can send you that it's real it's a real simple little Lisp retainer I could send it to you hi back over to you ask I don't see any others popping up but um I will let people know that if you just if you think of questions later you can just email Rick directly or you could respond to that GoToWebinar email that you received and we can get those to Rick or the appropriate party to answer your questions once again if you could take a few moments to fill out the survey we would appreciate it it will just pop up as we close down today and thanks everyone for attending thanks for the presentation Rick and have a great day everybody

Channel: Hagerman & Company, Inc.

Views: 80,727

Keywords: wd.env, project manager, autocad electrical drawings, interactive surfable pdf, electrical project, autocad electrical

Id: 2f6YDcS1j2c

Length: 75min 50sec (4550 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 13 2018