AutoCAD Electrical Working With Title Blocks

broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen-only mode welcome everyone and thank you for attending today's webcast AutoCAD electrical working with tidal blocks our presenter today is Rick France he's a solutions engineer with Hagerman & Company we're also joined on the line by Keith Doran he's a solution solutions engineer with Hagerman & Company and he's going to be on the line to answer any questions as they come in 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 side of your screen Keith can address those as we go and Rick will address them at the end as we close down the session today you'll be prompted to fill out a survey and we ask that you take a few moments to fill that out additionally all registrants will receive a follow-up email containing a link for the recording of this presentation and with that I'll hand things over to Rick well good morning everyone and this is part two of a two-part series we were doing the first part was a few weeks ago called working with projects and this is the second part which is working with tidal blocks so you should now be able to see my screen and basically I'm an AutoCAD electrical 20:18 and a couple of things we're gonna basically look at today is setting up that title block a couple of different methods for that and also your templates so we're gonna start here with a template I'm gonna go ahead and open up a template called Vandelay point to point this is a template file that at this point in time has not got anything in it to be an active AutoCAD electrical template so if I was to use this template not a cat electrical it would say hey I don't recognize this as AutoCAD electrical add certain blocks to it which we'll talk about in a minute it also does not have the title block in it so it is a little bit further down the road than just being a regular generic AutoCAD template because I've already got the viewport in it looking into paper space things like that and it's ready for my title block to be inserted so we'll start with that I'm gonna insert a title block that I have my computer that it's just a C size title block because I already have a D and a B size setup in the project so I chose to do a C size so I'm just inserting it as if it's the first time coming into this template now this particular title block is just generic basic AutoCAD it could have been created in AutoCAD LT 20 years ago there's nothing special about it other than attributes and that's what it needs to be not a cat electrical Tata block is attributes built into it so I'm going to open this up and autocad's block editor close the dynamic because it doesn't need to be dynamically or anything and kind of zoom in here that line going through my text is only there to make it a little bit faster during the webinar for me to place a couple of attributes here and basically I use paper space so I don't have to worry about an annotated scale my title block because I use paper space with a viewport but a lot of people don't and if you're one of those who does not use paper space and puts everything in model space but your title block there what I would suggest at this point in your title block inside your template is that you come over to the properties palette and make it annotate if that way if you change scale factors in your title block in your drawing the title block will adjust to that scale factor and scale for you and we'll have to scale it and things like that so basically when you use the scaling down here it's going to adjust automatically just by setting this particular block to annotate it now the main point of being here though for today is to talk about the attributes everything and the title block that's gonna work without a cat Electrical has to be attributes they do not have to be specific names or following kind of naming convention they just have to have a unique tag per attribute which is something most people do in AutoCAD anyways so just for those people who might not know how to add an attribute into a block in AutoCAD I want to add one right up here in the block editor you want to use this icon looks like a little mini pearl tag up here and you select mini pearl which is your attribute definition I'm gonna call this attribute client because that's the key is the tag all attributes have to have a tag and they need to be unique per attributes so that AutoCAD electrical knows where to place the information again the name of it doesn't matter because I got a map that still which we'll do in a minute prompt you can place it in there if you like I usually don't put a prompt I have in this particular title block just because it's supposed to be an older one but I usually don't put a prompt because it's really not necessary I'm gonna set it to preset in lock position that's just a personal preference preset means if I ever erase the title block and reinsert it it won't ask me for answers to each attribute it will just take the default value as the default at lock position we'll just keep people from being able to move it by accident out of position this is going to be a middle justification that's the right text style since my title block is annotated or in paper space I don't need the text to be imitative I'm gonna make this one an inch high so just your basic autocad attribute nothing special about it will place it in here and I'm going to place it right here at the end of that line right there that I've pre-drawn for it so basically that's all it is is put each one of these are attributes that were put in the same way some of them may have been copies for instance I could use autocad's copy command and if I have one already in here that's placed like that checked one I can just copy it use a notic heads copy command and then double click it and change the tag to whatever I need it in this case prompt also so that way I got a unique one therefore drawn by just use AutoCAD copy command so there's it's just putting getting these attributes in there now I like to use fields also whenever possible especially for certain attributes I usually use a film for the date I also use one for the scale and I attach the scale one to my viewport so that it controls what my scale is a couple of other ones I use with fields is I have one over here an attribute that's set up with the drawing file name so that's a field pull it in the drawing file name and this one is my plot date and time so I use fields for those functions because I like them a little bit better even though these two can be done without a cat Electrical the they only happen when you run a command and by using a field it happens instantly and I don't have to worry about running the update command every time I our plot or something to get those to update but just to show you how a field works again I'm gonna add an attribute I'm gonna call this one date and everything else I'm gonna leave the same other than I do want to middle definitely don't want to annotate it this one's gonna be point O seven high for the text size the way you add a field to an attribute is using this little button right here in the dialogue box at the default so I'll select that and these are the different categories for fields so you can use fields to do things such as date and time which is the one I'm gonna use document objects things like that so the scale down here uses an object I'm actually gonna do that one in a minute after we place the title block the only one here you can't use for AutoCAD electrical or don't need to use as a sheet set version sheets it managers what that's referring to and that is not used in AutoCAD electrical because you've got the project manager I'm gonna you can use document to get to things such as author and stuff like that I'm gonna go to date and time I'm gonna use creation date and place it there the reason I use creation date date would be today's date so every day it's gonna change plot dates and set is gonna change every time you plot your drawing save date that's by the way plot dates I'm using way over there on that other that other one over there save date will change every time you hit save creation date is when you get new drawing so I'm going to use creation that they set it for this exact date format here that's not staying year it okay you know Kay I got two decimal points in there hit OK and place it here in the date location I'm gonna go ahead and erase that line that I don't need so that's how I get the attributes in there once I have them in there close the block editor save the changes now because I made it change to this title block that already exists in this drawing because I inserted it later after you either use attribute sync which is great if I have more than one object in here so it's I only have the one I'm just going to erase it and reinsert it based on the one that's in the drawing and now you can see the date is filled out because it's already been that commutes are correct at this point now this last object here the scale I'm going to connect to this viewport I could not do that when I was in the block editor because I couldn't see the viewport but if I come in here and double-click it after I've placed it and then double click the value on the scale it recognizes it's not connected to an object so I'm gonna say objects buildings an object right here I'm gonna pick the object type and select the viewport itself it recognizes the viewport now I've got all different kinds of options here I can pick I'm gonna take the standard scale option hit OK hit OK and now whenever this viewport changes scale factors in a drawing this attribute will update with that scale factor so it's just another way of using those fields I usually leave the gray on on the fields which is the default value in AutoCAD so I can recognize those or fields when I'm looking at my drawing although they do not print or plot the only other things I do to get the template ready and out of that I've got my Tata block in here it's basically I set up my layers if I came over here I've got the layers already preset up in here to use all the different layers that come with AutoCAD electricals I set them up with colors and things like that so I'll get that I'll set up in my template likewise if I have certain wires that I use I suggest you get those into your template you just create them because let me hit cancel here and do this well do this before I show you if I come over here to model space to finish this out then I'll come back to wires to finish this out to make the template you want to get two blocks in your template one is called one or the other or both one is called WD underscore m if it's a schematic drawing it has to have that block in it it's a panel drawing has to have the block WD underscore P&L panel and that's what makes the drawing recognize to AutoCAD electrical the easiest way to get in your drawing well you saw there just run an AutoCAD electrical command so I'm on the schematic tab I usually hit the icon menu it's wanting that recognizes that this does not have the WDM in it I'll say ok it places it in the drawing I'll cancel if you wanted this to be a panel drawing go to the panel pet tab hit icon menu place the wdp and LM now every drawing I start with this template I'm just cancelling now the icon me will recognize that this is an AutoCAD electrical drawing and it won't ask me that question ever again back on the layers though for the wires if I hit create edit wire type I just created my wire layers that I wanted to inside this template so that it would be there for everything so those are kind of the things that you would do to pre set up your template however you need to get your layers get your wires in there get those one of those two blocks and there if not both and get your title blocks set up once you have that your templates ready to go so save it close it I've already got in my in here a drawing that's using that C size title block so this was the same title block already done just like the other one it's just already got everything in it to where I don't have to add those attributes they were already in this drawing and but this this one is ready to go I've got a C sighs I've got a B sighs here that I'm using for my single line diagrams and I've got my D sighs so we're gonna start here on the D sighs let me close a couple of drawings don't need to save them so I start here so when you're doing your title block when you're setting it up by the way I could have done this too when I was in the temple let me go back to the template and just show you one more thing I'm thinking about it if you don't like the organization of the attributes like if you double-click it you see here the attributes here there's a great little AutoCAD tool it's my favorite main command it's called batman' ba t t ma en and with this you can go into your title block and rearrange attributes if you don't like the sequence they're in so I could take client these are the three we just added to it move them up to the top move something down I'm going to move to draw drawing by here right with checked by for the fun of it I'll just move scale down to the bottom so you can rearrange these and get them to the sequence you want to if you don't like how they are set up hit OK and save your template all right back here now what I'm gonna do is show you a couple of different methods for setting up your title block the first thing though is understand what two types of information you're going to be pulling into your title blocks you have two types your project information and your drawing information drawing information if I go to properties on the drawing go to drawing properties is drawing information it is unique to each drawing so each drawing can be set up completely different this right here is your drawing descriptions this was talked about a little bit in the first one in working with projects you're drawing descriptions as information that's project wide every drawing gets the same information now this works off of a file called WD title dot wdl you can see here out of the box it's gonna say line 1 line 2 line 3 stuff like that really mix doesn't really tell you what information goes where we're gonna do this first one that we're setting up for this project as if it's on the network same time to block all projects this is my company title block that I use on every project for the most part every now and then you may have that project that uses a unique title block for that project but that's the exception to the rule not the norm this is the norm default one that's on our network so I want to set up this file that controls this description list so people know what to put where that is in my case I've got it on my network drive in my support folder and it's this one right here named default underscore WD title dot wdl right now if I open it up it just says line 1 through 12 the reason it said line 1 through 12 is not because this file says line 1 through 12 that's the name of those lines right now it doesn't know what to put there because they're blank even in this file so for instance this is going to be my project number we'll say this one's gonna be my client this is my project information so you just fill out the information that you want users to know where information goes so this will be checked by and this will be I'm going to keep it simple current Rev not go any further than that I'm gonna save this as is for now cuz I'm gonna come right back to it here in a second if I go back to my descriptions now and Treadstone you can see it's reading that file and you know where to put what information now it's finding that file because of the word paths that I set up in working with projects in part one I haven't changed anything from that last one that we did so it's no it's finding that file it's those two put this one information to replace line one line two with personally I don't like the fact that it still says line six and my 9 through 12 so the way you can fix that is just put a space after each one most books and people will tell you you don't not to even put this in for these in here in this file just put the ones you want and go with it the thing is if you put them in here and put that space it looks a lot easier on the eye so I'm gonna save it come back to description a lot easier for you to find exactly what you want to put and where in your description list for that project now this information is stored in that wdp file but this is the information that is going to be project wide on every drawing and you can make as many as these descriptions as you need my title blocks pretty simple so that's all I need we'll go ahead and say ok so now we're at the point we're ready to set up AutoCAD electrical to understand why did that information that those descriptions and drawing properties are used where and with white attributes of my title block first let me show you something here how odd account electrical searches for that information there's going to be two methods in the when we set up the title block when it's called method one one's called method two this right here is method two that's the first thing it does it looks for an attribute named WD t underscore t be inside the title block if it finds it it processes it if it doesn't then it moves on and starts looking for method 1 method 1 has basically two different options and so this is looking for the first option of method 1 so this is twos so this is the first met option of method 1 which is looking for WT file with the project name if it doesn't find that one then it goes to the second option which is looking for the default WD T if it finds that it processes that one if it doesn't then you get an error message so just to show you what we're talking about if I were in title block update at this point on this project when I don't have any of those methods yet set up I've stood on active drawing it went straight to the error message so there's the error message at the end where it tells me can't find the file can't find the attribute doesn't know what to do so we're gonna set that up and you do that from the project tab with title block set up right here now title block set up is gonna show us both methods method 1 up here and method 2 down here now here is my personal opinion you can take it or leave it I don't care what you read them books I don't care what you see on YouTube videos I don't care what you hear anywhere this is a bad idea don't do it don't ever do it it's like a virus once it gets in your title block it is a pain to get out and I've been paid a lot of money by companies to get that out of their title blocks on hundreds and thousands of drawings because they went with that method what makes that method so bad is you have a 256 character limit with attributes once you hit 256 characters you're done you can't add another one you can't add any more information that's it you're it is not learned to hit that 256 character so let me show you what I'm talking about right here is the out-of-the-box demo that comes from Autodesk unchanged that's what comes smarter desk out of the box you can see here they've set it up using this wdt file wdl file that's the same method we're about to use on ours they're using the option one of method one okay that's the way this is set up to work out of the box every demo that comes out of the box is set up this way however if I open that drawing right here one of those drawings for that demo I'm gonna double click on the title block there's that attribute it wins even though they're using the other method they have a 256 character limit and their title block because of that attribute and it's in every drawing of this project it's in every drawing of their templates it's an everything that you get from those demos from Autodesk and a lot of people have it why is that bad this is the one out of the box I'm gonna go to the end of the line of that attribute all right I'm gonna start typing I just hit to learn 56 characters I only added those ones right there that's how fast I hit it they only have about 8 or 9 attributes in this title block but they hit that 256 character it doesn't matter what you do to that file that attribute wins why because the system looks for that attribute first and if it finds it it wins over any other method so it's a bad bad bad idea in my personal opinion to use the method to I've had students that I've had in the past who ignored me and later on they're calling us up with tech support because they're trying to fix it and they can't they need to add or more information in the camp because they've hit that limit so I will shut up about that for now and let's go on and see how you should set it up kind of block set up don't use method to use method 1 method 1 gives us three basic options these two are almost identical and then you have this one this one here is for my title block on my network that's going to be used the majority of the time and in the projects so this is the one we're going to use first this one these two options are for unique title blocks in those drawing in those projects I personally the only difference between the two is the name of the file both are inside the project the file name is differently so I usually don't use this one just because it's the same name as this one and I don't like to be confused I usually use this one or this one just for the simplicity of making it easier to see the difference we're going to start with this one our network version now you can see here it's finding a default wdt file inside my network location that I placed it just to show you all I did was I created a file called default wdt you open it up it's completely empty there's nothing else the only reason I did that is because if that file doesn't exist some place for it to find it will create it under user at data local roaming some really weird name and you have to hunt it down so then you would create it and move it to the network so by creating that file first I don't have to find it and move it later and it found it right there but it is totally empty at this point so I hit OK after picking that option right now since it found it most don't want to overwrite or edit because if I'm making some minor changes to it and it may be on ik to do I just say override it since it's empty anyways at this point I cannot use active drawing this particular time we're going to do that in the next one because my active drawing is one of my schematics not my taught apply so I'm going to use pic block select my title block hit enter and it places the name of my title block in here now my D size title block happens to have the identical same attributes in it it's just a B size so technically I could just type in BT block - B and do them both at the same time but I'm gonna postpone that and show you another method later but both methods do the same thing but comma name of the title block I could follow the attributes are named identical in both title blocks as they are not be size and D size that I could just comment the other title block right there so we're gonna hit OK and at this point it's just simply matching the attributes that are in that title block to the values that I want again you have two different types of values project values drawing values so let's start here this one's project number I don't have a lot my title block so it doesn't take but a second client client project location just map each attribute to what they're gonna be used in the description file so this will be current ribs that's wrap so basically you can't it doesn't blank out these like it did in the description file itself but you can see that it's reading that same description file I created and I'm just mapping the ones that I had in that description file to where they're gonna be in the title block once I've got that one done we'll switch to drawing values just like that it's the drawing values so this is my drawing number I'm not using filename extension here so this and the plotting values I did the field instead that's the same thing only this will fill the field will be instant not only when I run the update command drawing description that's my drawing title a drawing type my drawing description section is gonna be area subsection will be action now I did this on purpose to show you that the attribute name doesn't have to match what it's being mapped to it can be something different so areas being the area of the plant section being the area that's that it is or the section of the area so that's my sub section so that's what I'm you set it up that way I am using the location code the sheet value is going right here and my maximum sheets is here you have the ability to put a previous sheet next sheet and some other options here that you can use but each one of these is being used in my title block down here the only one that we didn't map you at this point is the drawn by drawn by is right here that's the one we made a copy of in that sea size and everything I haven't done anything for that for that I'm gonna use what's called a user-defined attributes variable so if we hit user-defined I'm gonna set drawn for the drawn by I can hard code it put somebody's initials in there but every drawings gonna get those initials in the project I could also use what they suggest down here which is a list routine that's doing the get far login name so if I typed it in just like it is there to where it's got the open parenthesis good for login name and it would get whatever my login name is that's what it'll put it in the title block so to Rick France and that's my login main I'm gonna do it further I'm gonna do one I name myself it's called drawing by in parenthesis now what that one is as I've got a bit little a cat Lisp routine here that's got a routine in it called drawing by that's what I'm calling right there it gets a login name and it basically says if the login name is Bruce Wayne initials are rvw so login names Jack Sparrow CGAs so it just goes through and there's my login name with my initials so it's just set up for the for the company to where it says if it's this login name use these initials so a little routine that I wrote up for doing that let me close it back I'll show you how it's loaded in a second - I'll update the list so that it's drawn is gonna be set by that routine that that Lisp routine I'll say okay once I've got this done hit okay it's done it's ready for I can now update my title blocks when I'm ready to however before I do that let me show you I did on the panel drawing itself I have set up four tabs here and I did this on purpose so this is my normal D sized one right here that's on every other drawing here's a D size in the same drawing on a different form on a different tab here's that C size own we did on another tab and then here's ad size one so it says dinickel tada block is just going to a PDF file instead of a printer I did this for one reason I've looked noticed on when I'm doing things on the internet most people think that you can only have one kind of block per drawing and that's not true it's one title block filled out but I can have different title blocks of different sizes for different types of prints all within the same drawing and then the title block update will recognize that so that's the reason I wanted to point that out but right now the only one we've assigned is the t block D so let me show you a couple of things here real quick and let me show you this before I go any further - on the C size 1 the C size 1 with that we did I did on purpose denim and p nueng here on all the other title blocks the tag is drawing them DWG Nam and project num I purposely did the C size when different because another thing that I've seen all over the Internet is all title blocks have to use the same attributes and that's just not true as long as you set it up correctly now if you're using the title block set up past that first one didn't yes that's true that's the only way you can do it but you can work around that by opening up this default wdt file you can have multiple title blocks this way this is the one we just created and we over wrote and created this one that be size one uses all the same attributes I simply have to say comma T blk - because that's the name of my b-sides title block and it's done and ready to go but that C size one has different attributes for drawing number and project number so for that one all I have to do is copy this come down here we'll change this to T block - see this should be D none and this one should be P num and if I had any others dad changed I would just change those in this same list here but I can't do these from the talib lock setup to do something like that you have to do it inside the file itself but once this is done I've got three different title blocks being controlled about one command in one file and even if they're in the same file but all of them in the project but that's all I have to do to get those three title blocks set up now it's simply how to block update I've got everything pre-checked here ready to go so I'll get to this project wide do all okay notice I didn't get the message of no wdt file because it found at this time it's going through the entire project I happen to be on the control panel right now we'll come back to it let's look at this one first so here's my D size on sheet what all filled out here's my single line diagram which is a B size all filled out here's that point to point which is a C size all filled out including having different attribute members for drawing number and project number because I set it up for Pete Medina so use three different title blocks to them the same attribute names one of them completely different and even within the same drawing it still works so let me close some stuff here and get to that sheet with the panel drawing and here's my beast size tab on the panel drawing there's my D size tab there's my C size tab and there's my deep size PDF one command did them all so a lot of things you'll read on the internet they'll say you can't do yeah you can you just gotta make sure you set up that file correctly but that's how I would do my default one for everything just take a few minutes here and let me show you because it won't take long here to show you how to do the one for a unique project that's gonna be I've got this one client that wants me to use their title block it's pretty simple to do i'm gonna activate minas tirith here and we'll just open up the first drawing for now so here it is there's the title block that the my client wants me to use it there so I need to set it up to work with it but I do not want it to interfere with my other one that I have set up for all the other projects that would that I'm working on so for this one I'm gonna do the title block setup for that first method one that first option but to show you that act how it works with the act of drawing what I'm gonna do is just open up their title block so they said sent me and I put it in the project file for them ministereth right here that is their title block they had sent me so I'm just gonna open it up again just a regular AutoCAD title block no fields in this one it's all call attributes using all different kinds of attribute names you can see they've even got a revision title block so since I'm not using Balt I'm gonna set this revision up to work with my description files show you what I mean real quick if you looked at the description file we'll do it this way let me show you it's there first if you looked under here I've got a description valve for this project only this project sees it if I open it up this way under descriptions you can see it's got the information just like we set up before on the other one I just did it that one there for the project for all the project information and here's the revision information this is revision line one it's the next button here there's revision line two now this is great as long as every drawing in the project gets the same revision information which in this case it's going to if a good one drawing is revised the I'll get revised so this works very good for that method because I can just set it up here all the way through line 13 there so this takes me up to line 13 here if I go one more now it's just reading line information cuz I didn't set up anything past this line so it's going through line 84 to get all that revision information in there so I need to set that up now we oughta count electrical so using the title block setup I'm gonna use project wdt file and it's gonna place it in the project with the same name again this is the same exact thing it just gives it the name default instead of minas tirith through your project may i want to use the project name just to keep this separate in my minds that's why i use the top way this is the act of drawing so I'm gonna get active drawing so it understands that the title block is the drawing I have open that's the only difference between active drawing and pit box it's how it gets the name in there I could literally type the baton in there well hit OK I'll just do a few here cuz I've got one in the oven but just like before you set a project number projects things like that you also when you're doing it this method you have this pick method here so I can say pick the description that's gonna be this one pick the city state that's this after view and I could go through here and do that for all of them let's say we're to picket revision twos right there revision to date will pick it and it takes the attribute r2d2 pick it takes the attribute are to be I just caught that I didn't even see I had a joke in there and I've got one alright pick this one and you could go through the whole thing setting this up and it's gonna create the file but of course I don't want you to sit here and watch me sit up all these all the way thru rif 13 I'm just showing you it was sets up exactly the same way we just did being the active file we could have do the pic I've got one in the oven I'm gonna close this out I'm gonna come over here under my supplements I've got one already completely filled out here with all that stuff already picked so I'm just gonna overwrite the one I just created so it gets the whole thing so we'll say copy over here to this project there's the one I just created I want to just delete it and paste over it so once I've done that for this project I'll use a update retag this time since I don't want to do the whole project of everything take out everything but the title block update setup here everything's already set up for the entire project just hit OK do all okay and it's gonna update this project based on that file for this title block so I have two different systems set up within the same environment because of the method it's looking for when it finds that one for the project it uses it if it doesn't then it looks for my default one that I have on the network so that way if there's one for the project it always wins if not it just uses my default one which is my title block and that way I can control different environments and different projects you can see here a filled out my entire title block except for drawn by checked by and scale I purposely did that because I want to show you you don't have to use the title block update command for everything in the you can't have some stuff that setup to be manually entered so I've got drawn by check vine skill or a manual entry for this particular project so if I double click it notice this is why I leave off the prompts I can tell there's no prompts for all this so don't fill it out let the software handle it but I have prompts for these top three and that's to let me know that's just my method this needs to be filled out it's drawn by me checked by Captain Jack Sparrow and the drawing skill just to show you different I'm gonna make it full but here's another thing you have to remember don't change stuff that's not controlled manually like these three because they will get overwritten to show you what I mean I'm gonna go down here to the line five that's red for the date is I'm just making one up to nine eighteen by re F and for the description I'll just put in a bunch of garbage so I filled out that information right there manually but watch what happens when I do a Tata block update again and for this one I'm just gonna do that one sheet said the one that means that you always see how won't take as long but what you'll see here is it blanked out everything I did here because I filled it out manually in here instead of in the descriptions of how to filled it out in the descriptions here it would have been put it in my title block but if you ever do anything manually it will override them unless they're set up like these where they're not matte and they're set up to be done manually so that's kind of how you can use a couple of different methods for setting up your title block it's not that hard but that's pretty much it that was that'll set it up and the main thing to remember is the process that's going through when it's searching so that you understand the difference between the different files that might be involved just to let you know we have some digital support offered we have document management system and simulation processes that you can get services for from us if there are any questions though let's go ahead and answer those right now so do we have any that come in Keith just a couple but I think they've been taken care of maybe maybe your take on what the difference between a field and an attribute is well Phil can be in both text or an attribute either one an attribute is it has to be inside of a block first of all so it's basically text inside of a block that's can be variable it can be written as different information because if you have just regular text let me get back to my screen here this right here where it says drawn by is just text so that never changes but this can be changed from cata block to title block and set differently so that's difference between text and that attribute a field can be in text also there's issues if you try to put it filled inside text inside of a block so if you're gonna do field in text you wouldn't normally put it inside of a block sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't just depends on what the field is connected to most of the time it probably won't for you so if you want field inside of a block it needs to be inside of an attribute but a field is just something that reaches out and pulls in different information like right here and my title block in the other project let me go ahead activate it and we'll go here to the panel layout for instance so I have this field of the scale tied to well yeah I didn't mean to do that I have it tied to the top to the scale of that viewport now hasn't refreshed yet since I just messed it up but I said that's why it's reading the 1 to 4 so what happens is if I change this scale factor from let's say 1 to 4 to one two eight and then I'm gonna lock it at that scale factor right here what will happen is when I reach in well are there you go not that field is what's pulling that scale factor from that viewport because it's connected to the viewport the date is just connected to I haven't connected to the date of when you hit create new trying so it puts that date in there that becomes the day so fields are pulling document information or object information into it so you can see here it's pulling the file name if I see the save as another file name is he right now it's II 1 1 2 dash 0 0 1 if I literally did a save as and name this one he 1 1 2 0 1 a for instance see it updated that with the a instantly because of it being a field since the drawing name changed that field updated so that's kind of the difference it's a fit the field is inside the attribute the way you're setting it up so in your case you created the revision block where the information that was contained within it was updating via the descriptions the wdl values on the file if he's had individual drawings that had unique revision blocks meaning that each sheet in the set was not being updated simultaneously they were not being revised simultaneously what method would you recommend the user used in that case the man that I use if I'm not using vault I would recommend involved that would be the ideal way to do it but if you're not using vault what I do is I have a single block here and I just fill it out manually so I'd say this is Rev 0 it's put in the date put in the description stuff like that so I have it that way when I go up to noon in revision level I just insert a new block and fill it out now I would I hit browse I didn't need to do that now I would probably do that myself with a I would have it's a command where I wouldn't have to hunt it down like that and I'd also I think it's set up to where yeah I said I accidentally did it on zero I would have I would set it up to where I should have done it that way let me redo that what I did was I had the insertion point already defined I would do it that way and I don't have the attributes currently set up to where they that it pulls me up that didi acts I do them by accident in this drawing when I wasn't thinking I just never fixed it because I don't use it that much what I'm teaching but I would have it set up to pull me up a dialog box when I insert I put it in that way there's no way to do it for drawing either by that method is the only way or I could have it in the title block and fill them out for drawing individually but it's still a manual step a vault would kind of resolve that issue for you so I would recommend volved as the ultimate method but if you don't have Falls this would be an alternative so if you wanted to create the wdl and the WDC files manually meaning not using any tools within the software you could in theory just create a text file name the extension wdl or wdt and place it in the root of the project folder correct correct although it's not a wdl file it has to have the underscore WD title dot wdl so it's more than just wdl if it doesn't have that underscore WD title it will ignore it and then it has to have the project name or say default underscore WD title this one here you could literally just open it up create a new one and say line one equals whatever line two equals so this one you would create that way and this the wdt file you just have to know the names of the attributes themselves and then what they reference here and if you go to the Autodesk AutoCAD electricals health files it will tell you all the different names that go on the right-hand side that they have to be to make this work so the left-hand side is whatever you name the right-hand side is what AutoCAD electrical calls it sure but in my experience the one thing that I would definitely recommend as far as your attribute name definitions is don't use weird care in those names and the main reason for it is that when you go to that wdt file it has to put an accent marker in front of that character and that in turn changes essentially the functional name so in Greer's past we had like drawing the pound for drawing number and you know when you go to the wdt file that name doesn't match the attribute name in the file itself so right you know just take those goofy names those goofy characters wildcard characters out of the good attribute names just to save yourself some headache there yeah there's a lot of characters you can't even use in a knack of you tag anything else the only the only question left is um do the same rules apply for AutoCAD mechanical and and I think Rick and I can both save it now completely different least same rules don't apply for AutoCAD architecture plant 3d P&ID each one of those pieces of software have their own mechanism for it this is strictly autocad electricals method but I use the exact same title block in every program I mean if you take a plain 3d class from me it's the exact same title block here that I used an AutoCAD electrical I use a plant 3d I just have to set it up differently in plant 3d that I do AutoCAD electrical and that is one of the nice things about AutoCAD electrical is that at the core even though you do have all these extra tools running on top of it it's still just an AutoCAD block with attributes in it correct correct they just have special names most of the time any other questions that is it for the question all right then we will turn this back over to Ashley okay well thanks for the presentation Rick um this will conclude our broadcast if you have additional questions that you think of later you can simply reply to the confirmation or reminder email you received from GoToWebinar we get we can get those to Rick to have your questions answered further once again if you could take a few moments to fill out the survey we would appreciate it we'll just pop as we close down today and thank you for attending the webcast have a great day everybody

Channel: Hagerman & Company, Inc.

Views: 36,084

Keywords: AutoCAD Electrical, TItle BLocks

Id: DYHPg6djwwo

Length: 53min 14sec (3194 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2018