Feeling the Spark for the AutoCAD Electrical Toolset

MAN: AutoCAD Electrical.

AUDIENCE: [CHEERING]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Thank you.

MAN: Thank you.

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: All right. Thank you, everybody for humoring us on that one. And thank you-- special, special thanks to you.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

WOMAN: Yeah, there are open computers, guys. We had a full class, but I knew lunchtime would probably create a little divergence of people actually entering. So if you guys want to spread out to be able to work on your own computer, do it. Do it. Yeah, there's two up here, one back there, one back there-- two back there. I will give you time. You know you want to be in the driver's seat. What is with this? Why does everybody all cluster in the back? I don't bite. I promise.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: I know. I'm proud of you. All right. Have we musical chairs or are we moving? Anybody else? Good deal. We're getting there. There's a couple up here. Yeah. Good deal. I like it. I like it, I like it. All right. Welcome, everybody. Oh, we're getting a few more? Come on in. There's some open ones. I think there's an open one back there. Or you can join up with others, but I think there's-- I thought there was an open one-- maybe not.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Are we full now? We might be full now. All right. I have to tell you guys-- I've taught a lot of classes here at AU. I've not actually taught a lab before, so when I started looking at my attendee list, I'm like, I have 85-- how am I going to have 85 people on 85 computers? Then I realized, I joined you all up. But, look. You guys got to spread out a little bit. It's good. Good deal. Good deal, good deal. All right. This is taking forever to move, and I don't know why. It's going to drive me a little bit nuts. The delay is massive. Any thoughts on this, guys? OK, finally.

So for those of you that don't know me, my name is Tiffany Bachmeier. I lead the Manufacturing Consulting Team for the Americas here at Autodesk. Really excited to talk to you guys, though, today about AutoCAD Electrical. That's my other hat. If I had two hats, I'd put on a different hat. So I am a resident AutoCAD electrical expert. I'm also joined by three of my esteemed colleagues, also experts in the back there. So massive kudos to my lab assistants. Thank you very much, you guys.

They'll be coming around, helping you, working through all these things, but we're going to really work together through this. Stop me. It's going to be very interactive. I really want you guys to get a feel for how to use this software. So this might be a little different than most hands-on labs. We're not going through a very specific, certain workflow or certain specialty that might happen with the software. I really want to give you guys-- that's why you all came, right? You read the class summary. I really want to give you guys a feel for just how to do an end-to-end workflow within AutoCAD Electrical. So my goal today is really to take you from creating schematics, connecting those to panels, going through maybe some editing capabilities, adding wires-- that's all part of that creating the schematics-- going to the panels, then running auditing and reports. And then we'll probably do a little bit of automation at the end too. But just giving you that full feel of the workflow in the 90 minutes that we have together. Does that sound good?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Awesome. Brilliant. All right. So I'm going to ask just a couple quick questions. I'm just curious of where we are. So first of all, how many of you actually have AutoCAD Electrical installed? Good. Good. That's a lot. That's good. And how many of you are using it, but just using it as pretty much vanilla AutoCAD? Are you playing with a button or two? OK.

And how many of you have used it, but aren't really sure if it's configured correctly-- maybe that's why you came to Rob and I's class this morning? Yeah. That's fair. OK. And the last question-- how many people aren't using it yet, but you're just really hoping to get a test drive on it, because you're trying to see-- oh, that's awesome, you guys. I'm excited. Perfect. Well, this is going to be it then-- hands-on test drive. Good deal. Sweet. I am excited about that.

All right. Really, really fast. I just want to take you through a couple of quick slides, and then we're going to spend the whole time in the software. So how many of you have actually ever been to one of my webinars? I conduct two webinars a month. One of them is a demonstration webinar on boosting your productivity. How many of you have been to that one online? Yeah? Awesome.

And how many have actually been to my office hours? OK, not too many. All right, guys. Just so you know, those two things exist. So on the first Thursday of every month, I actually run a demonstration webinar that can expose you to all the things AutoCAD Electrical can provide you. So if you have more colleagues and people after you leave here that you really want to have them experience what AutoCAD Electrical can do with them, they won't be hands-on test driving it-- although, they could-- while I'm going through the webinar. It'll give them that exposure. And you can invite them to that.

And the third Thursday of every month, I do my office hours. Beginner, intermediate, advanced-- doesn't matter where you are in your journey. It is an open office hours for just any questions. And people come from all over the world. I go through as many questions as I can. Typically, I get through all of them, but we will go through anything and everything. So just keep those two things in mind after you leave here if you guys have questions.

Now, my esteemed colleagues have-- well, they will have-- these. If any of you don't have them yet, if you didn't come to the class this morning, these are quick reference guides that I create. They're also attached to this class in a PDF form so that you can download them not in a laminated form. These are my gift to you for coming. Thank you for coming. And they are a great way to just have a quick reference to some of the key points within Electrical. At the bottom of the back, though, is my contact info. So if you want to be on those webinars, if you want to get links, info, and all of that, please email me. I will connect you to all of that stuff. OK? Good? Perfect. Thanks, you guys, for passing those out.

Moving on. So some of the benefits of using the AutoCAD Electrical toolset-- what I really want to just expose you guys to is some of the things that we get, the benefits that we get. So in vanilla AutoCAD when we're doing controls design, we typically are doing very manual things. You can see a key term here on this slide, right? Manual creation-- are you raising your hand for him or for me? Him. Perfect, OK. Manual creation of symbols, manual tagging, manual cross referencing, manual reports, manual editing-- there's a theme here, right?

I love AutoCAD. I started on R10. It is my favorite software package on the planet. I have a very special place in my heart for it. But when I was in controls design in the industry, I'll tell you what. It's painful without all the extra tools that we get within Electrical. So enter AutoCAD Electrical and all of its capabilities-- built on top of AutoCAD, has all of our favorite things about it. And here are just five quick hits. Now, there's a lot more, but these are some of the key things that I think really boost our productivity.

Symbol libraries with over 2,000 symbols already built for you and industry standard. How many of you worked at companies where it's just the same push button or relay because it's been there forever and some guy built it back in 1995 in AutoCAD? And you just keep using it and copying and pasting it? Yeah, even if you're not admitting it, I know there's more of you out there than that poor one person back there, because I know that's happening.

So this is the beauty of these symbols. They are actually industry standard symbols. So every single company is using them. Does that mean you're not going to create your own? Of course not. Of course you're going to create custom symbols, but they're really easy to do inside of Electrical. And they'll have all the intelligence and everything else that we need. But how great is it that then you can start to standardize with all of your symbols? So that's really huge.

Automatic tagging, automatic cross referencing, and real-time cross referencing-- so it's not going to stop and ask you. It's just going to go back and reference with parent-child relationships, panel footprints to schematics. You don't have to think about where all that stuff is. Which drawing was this on? And which drawing was that on? It's going to do it for you. That is a huge benefit to it.

Automatic reports-- this is probably the biggest one. Why would I have to manually create bills and materials, and wire from-to lists, and nameplate reports, and wire labels, and everything else that we have to do, if I can just have my drawings do that for me? Huge. Huge time saver and huge error reduction.

And I celebrate this one. I put it in caps. It's such a simple utility, but the Title Block Update utility is awesome. When I first got into AutoCAD Electrical, right when it came to the inception of being a part of the Autodesk family, was when I was out searching. I was given a task by my boss. Like I said, I was in the industry. I worked for an OEM for conveyor design.

And at the time, I was given 500 drawings that all were pretty much exactly the same, but they just needed title block updates. That was my job. I was fairly new into the company, and I was given those kinds of tasks. And I'm like, OK, this is easy, but it's going to take me forever. Why am I going to do this? So I started searching. I wasn't a programmer. I wasn't going to search and create a script or do anything like that.

I'm like, there's got to be something that already does this. And through AutoCAD Electrical, I figured out how to throw all those drawings into a project file without even having them be intelligent. Ran the Title Block Update utility on them. Figured out how to link my attributes to it. It was really easy to do.

Ran them. Had them done in an hour. Handed it back to-- and that was after downloading the trial, putting it all in there, figuring out how to do it-- handed it back to my boss. And he said, how on earth did you get this done this fast? And I said, AutoCAD Electrical, and you're buying it for me. He said, yes, I am. So that's why I talk about it, because it's such a simple utility, but it's so powerful with the time saving that it can give us.

So these are the things we're going to look at. One other quick thing-- a study was done back in 2015. I love this productivity study. It just shows you side-by-side some key things that you have to do from vanilla AutoCAD to Electrical. Look at the hit rate here. Creation of new designs was 84% faster in AutoCAD Electrical from AutoCAD. Existing designs, editing of existing designs, 77% faster. And error reduction was massively reduced, because of a 67% reduction in commands used. So that's some of the things that we're going to talk about today as we work through this, is how much faster-- it's going to look like a really simple command, but when you turn it around and think about it in your head, all the things that you would have had to do manually in AutoCAD to do it, that's where you're really going to see that time saving.

So with that said, the one last thing I want to take you through is the actual installation. We teased this, if you came to the class this morning, that I had some installation images. This is that extension of the configuration. For any of you that were there in the implementation class, we talked about the fact that the best way for you to install AutoCAD Electrical and set it up properly is to do it from the very beginning. And don't try to do it after you install it.

A lot of people come to Rob and I's implementation class, because they want to configure and figure out on the network how to share libraries, and the catalog databases, and all the symbols, and everything else. If you do it right from the beginning, you're not going to have that hardship of trying to retroactively do that. So really, really important that you install using this expand. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: So would you suggest somebody going back in, uninstalling it, and reinstalling it?

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: 100%-- way faster than trying to do it all manually through the environment file and moving all those files around. So you'll see on the back of your little sheets that I handed you out-- or the front, actually, I should say-- all the different support paths that exist when it goes to the C drive. There are five major support paths. And there are massive amounts of folders underneath all those support paths. Doesn't really matter for an individual install, but when you're trying to retroactively move all of those to share them with people, it is a much more painful process than if you just do it right out of the gate.

So here's another thing too. A lot of people will install it and say, I didn't get all those manufacturers. How do I get them? Well, this is right here. So where it says, click to close and return to the product list, that you're seeing at the top there, if you hadn't had it expanded, it would have said, expand to configure your product.

In here, we can start to say how many manufacturers we want. Now, you can choose. You don't have to choose them all. And the only reason it says, not recommended for the Select All, is just so you don't have a massive library if you don't need it. But I always select all, because I always want to have every manufacturer that I can in there whenever I'm in front of people and talking about all the things that we have inside the software.

So this is key. You choose your manufacturers. You choose what symbol libraries you want. So you can see all of our different-- so this is actually what your standard is, what your default is going to be. And then the next screen capture here is all of our libraries. It's one in the same, basically, but you're choosing what libraries you want to install.

We have the US standard in imperial. We have the US standard in metric. We have IEC for the international standard. We have the Japanese, Chinese, and Australian standards as well. All come with the software. It's not something you have to buy separately or do anything like that. It all comes with it.

And if you note, right here-- and this is when I should have had a little pointer-- right at the bottom there, it says, please define a location for the symbol libraries. That's where you can put in your network location. Or if you want to connect it to our Data Management Package, that's where you would tell it to look in your C Drive Vault Workspace. And then you would just copy those things up into Vault. Hi, Mark. Nice to see you.

All right. So those are the key things to be installed. If you do this from the beginning, your setup is going to be so much easier. And then create a deployment package. And you can just roll it out to all your users. So if it's not just you using this, if you have a lot of other people within your company doing it, get it set up. Everybody will share the same connection then. And you'll all be able to work from there. All right. So I'm going to dive in now. I'm just going to quickly talk about the project file. And then we're just going to do it. And we're going to stay in the software the rest of the time. Does that sound good? OK.

So project files are what link our drawing files together. So we use, natively, DWG files. I get asked all the time, is it in a DWGE? I've actually been asked that question. No, there's no such thing as a DWGE. There's not an Electrical drawing file. These can be opened in AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT. Anybody using it, it uses all the same functionality that you would have in AutoCAD. So an AutoCAD user can absolutely open your drawings. The key is, you would much rather have them all edited inside of Electrical, because there's a lot more tools to do it with. But they are fully-visible, fully-editable, fully capable of being consumed in vanilla AutoCAD or LT.

So the thing that connects them, the thing that makes them so powerful to be able to run reports, to be able to get that real-time cross referencing, and updating, and all of that, is this project file. The WDP file connects all the drawings that you want to it. Now, you get to define what a project means to you. It might mean five drawings. It might mean 500 drawings. It depends on what a project is to you, but if you want something to be able to be connected from one drawing to another, then those need to be inside the same project. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Questions, by the way, totally welcome. Absolutely.

AUDIENCE: If you're using vanilla AutoCAD to edit--

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Yep.

AUDIENCE: Do you risk breaking important--

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: It's a wonderful question. I'm going to repeat it. If you use vanilla AutoCAD to edit, do you risk breaking links? Now, the answer is no, but there's an asterisk. So the answer is no if that person is actually a skilled AutoCAD user that is using AutoCAD properly. If they're a rogue AutoCAD user that does crazy things in AutoCAD, because it allows us to, now you're running risks. So if you've ever been in any of my classes, you'll know that explode is a dirty, dirty word. And if somebody does that, because they have no idea how to edit other than they're just going to explode it, now you're risking breaking links-- and burst counts too for anybody thinking about it. I see you.

So yes, the key-- and actually, whenever I teach AutoCAD Electrical classes, I actually teach an AutoCAD update day in front of my AutoCAD Electrical day to ensure that everybody is using AutoCAD to their full capacity, because it is AutoCAD. It still has a lot of functionality that we want to use from vanilla AutoCAD. So that's a really good question. It's a really important thing.

A lot of people learn AutoCAD by their buddy next to them, off the cuff, on the fly. And they get there. And I'm sure you guys have all heard the jokes about it takes seven different ways to do things in AutoCAD. But there are definitely efficient ways and inefficient ways. And there are also wrong ways. There are ways that are not the best for you. Now, they might be allowable, because there's not all that intelligence in AutoCAD, but as soon as you bring it into a vertical, like a mechanical, and electrical, and architecture, now you've got problems. So really good question.

But we do have a really awesome utility. I wasn't going to dive into this, but I'm glad you asked it. We have a utility inside of Electrical that is actually called the Mark/Verify. Who's heard of it? Anybody? Of course you have, Randy. I love that you answer, though.

So we have a tool within Electrical that you can actually run, what we call, a mark on the entire project set-- if you think somebody else is going to open it or you're sending it to somebody. And it will track any changes made to that project, whether they came from AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, or AutoCAD Electrical. So when you bring it back in, you can run a Verify and see anything that has happened to that project set-- deletes, edits, anything. So it's a pretty powerful tool to be able to see if you do have concerns that somebody might be going a bit rogue on your drawings. It's also just a good way to track if you're collaborating and you want to see where changes have been made. It doesn't have to always be for policing people, but--

But anyway, I just want to talk about that project file, because now we're going to go in. And we're actually going to open our project file, get our data sets going. And we're going to start going. Good? Any open questions before we dive in? Brilliant. Let's do this.

So I need to switch. And how do I do that? Is this five? No one told me. Which one is this one? Am I up? Good. Brilliant.

So I'm already in, just because I tested it, but I'm going to walk you guys through this. We're all going to have to do this together. Now, keep in mind, the way these labs have been set up is they're virtual machines. So things are a little slow. There will be a lag. That is not AutoCAD Electrical. That is the virtual machine setup. I was noticing it as I was testing some things. I'm going to be going through it with you. I was going to do it on my own computer, but I decided that I would experience the full experience with you. So we're going to do that. Yes?

LAB ASSISTANT: Can you remind people that if they ask any question at all to raise their hand, and one of three of us will be there to tell people? That's what we're here for.

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Absolutely.

LAB ASSISTANT: We're not just handsome decorations in the back.

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: You are handsome decorations, though, in the back. Yeah. Please do that. So I have three, like I said before, amazing lab assistants. This is Rob, Todd, Randy. Please feel free to beckon them over. And guys, also, please just keep an eye on everybody and see if they look like they're struggling. Thanks.

So what we're going to do-- and you know what? I'm going to do a really quick-- because this is not my computer-- hold on one second. If you guys have never seen this, it is actually pretty awesome. Have you guys ever changed your mouse settings before to do the Control key? Have you guys ever seen it? All right. Hold on. So this little icon right here, show the location of your pointer when you press the Control key, is my favorite thing on the planet. So if you guys are ever helping anybody else, do it. It's a really cool thing to do, because what it allows me to do is tell you to, hey, look over here. So yeah, just a little tip there.

So what I want you guys to do-- come up. You don't have to do anything. I know you're in a screen where you don't have an image open and it just says, open drawing, and the big button, and all that. That's totally fine. Stay there. What I want you to do is go into the Project Manager. And I want you to click on the Open Project button. So it's the very first button on the left-hand side of that little toolbar inside the Project Manager.

Yeah? Everybody there? Now, we're going to have to navigate together to this. You're going to go right to the root of C. You're going to go into Data Sets. And then you have to scroll through all the data sets. And I want you to find the one that says, Feeling the Spark for AutoCAD Electrical. It'll be a big list, because it's every lab that's in this room. And when you get there, I then want you to open up the folder underneath it that says, AU 2019 NFPA. And then let me know when you get there. So you're going C drive, Data Sets, and then the Feeling the Spark.

AUDIENCE: Does Feeling the Spark start [INAUDIBLE]?

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Oh, no. Yes, it does. It's MFG. So it's manufacturing-- yeah, so look for the MFG. I just didn't think you'd want to look for that number. Yeah, you're looking for MFG. It's all the way down at the bottom. 321761 is the number, but that's kind of a pain. Just get into the M's. And then look for Feeling the Spark.

Somebody gave me a tip that you should just pre-open the data sets for all of them. And I thought, that's a good idea. But then I thought, well, I really want them to open a project and feel what that feels like. But now I'm thinking we should have done that. So sorry about that. All right. Are we there? No, not yet?

When you get into that folder, you will see a project file that says the same name as the folder. You will click on that. And you will hit Open. I will leave my screen here, though, just so you guys can see it. Once we do this, the rest is going to be easy. Oh, there's a question there.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Oh, that's fine. So yeah, if you actually click on it to open, you're going to get an error dialog box. That's totally fine. It's because they make you zip these up when we hand them off. And so it was obviously on my computer with a file link to a different folder structure. It's totally fine. Just hit OK on that. If you guys are that far, that's fine. Get through that next screen and just hit OK.

Are we good? Is everybody there? Should I close this? Yes? Oh, no? You got guys coming. We've got people, everybody. All right. When it opens, it's going to open in your Project Manager just like this. You'll see AU 2019 NFPA, yes?

Awesome. Hit the little plus button next to it. That will expand the project. It will expand to show you two folders. This is an option. You do not have to create folders, but I love them. So folders are like mini projects that you can put inside of the overarching projects. It is not a Windows folder. It does not change the file paths. Our best practice is to keep our project and our drawing files in the same folder.

So that folder we were just in, even though you didn't see all the drawings, it's because it was only searching for WDP files. You would see that all of the drawings are in that same folder. What the folders here inside the Project Manager do for us is they actually allow us to group drawings into whatever structures we want. And then we can run any of our project-wide commands on just the specific folder. So project-wide doesn't mean project-wide. You can choose what you want to actually do. It just means more than one drawing. So keep that in mind.

Now, you can pick and choose manually. But the beautiful part about these folders is you can actually say, I want to just run this x, y, z, whatever it is we're doing, on just the Schematic folder or just the Panel folder or just my Motor Control folder or just my PLC folder. Are you getting the gist?

So if you have multiple teams working inside the same project, maybe you have a project of a hundred drawings, somebody could be working in just one subset of that, but the overall project needs to be connected or have the same bill of material or whatever else that may be. But by being able to have those separate folders, we can work as multiple teams working inside the same project. Cool? Yeah? Sweet.

So expand Schematics for me. And then I want you to go to drawing 4. That is the drawing I'm on. Just double-click on it. By the way, just so you guys know, I have a hand out for you that goes through this entire workflow with all the step-by-steps of everything we're doing today, so that you guys can experience it with the data set files and everything else for the class after the class. So if you want to be able to go back, and do this on your own, and just kind of take it a little slower, and be able to do that, it is a full step-by-step process that's all uploaded for you on the AU website. Are we good? I haven't lost anybody yet? Yeah?

RANDY: You can also close the Catalog Browser dialog box if you have that open. Just click on the X on the corner.

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Yes. I forgot I did that, actually, before I walked in. So if yours looks like this right now with this guy open, you can just close it. We'll talk about that guy in a minute. But go ahead and just close it. Thank you, Randy. Perfect, perfect.

We've already talked about libraries. I was going to talk to you a little bit about libraries, but what I want to show you is the project properties really fast. And then we're actually going to go in and start drawing. So if you guys all, with me-- I don't know why they set the computer up way over here. I'm running back and forth. Now I get why you might want to actually get somebody up here to drive for you while you talk.

If you right-click on the project, this is what we call the Active Projects menu. So there's a different menu if you were to right-click on one of the projects in this list that's not active. We only can have one active project at a time. So we get a lot more info and availability to do things when we're actually on our active project.

So what I want you guys to do is come all the way to the bottom and click on Properties. And I just want you guys to take a minute here to look at all the different things that we can do inside of here. So if you expand Schematic Libraries for me, you will see that we are actually pointing at-- and I just realized this might not have-- did it update? We might have a fun little-- we might have a fun little situation here.

It should have updated when it came in. And I didn't see it do it. I wonder if it's the virtual machine. Do me a favor, just to make sure that we don't have any issues. Click inside that Browse-- or click inside the browser of the full link. Don't actually click the Browse button. If you did, just hit Cancel. And just change the 2019 to 2020. It should have automatically sunk when it came in here, but it didn't, which is weird. I'm wondering if it's the virtual machine, because typically, whenever you bring a project forward from an older release to a newer release, it will automatically update it. It's a little weird that this one didn't. You can literally override it. Just hit 2020, and it should work.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Yeah, don't double-click. Just single-click into it to edit.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Yes. You highlight it and then single-click into it to edit it.

RANDY: Just the first one--

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: No, just do the top one. Just do the top one. We're not going to hit that deep into all of this during these 90 minutes, so we're good. Yeah, Randy?

RANDY: You might also be able to click just on the Schematic Libraries heading and click Default, and it'll get in all of your--

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Yeah, you can do that too. Yep?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Oh, no. Then somebody set this-- yeah. This is the problem with me not getting to install the software. But that's a good point. So if you do set up your defaults like I showed you in the installation images to being proper, if you ever run into this issue, you can absolutely do that and have the default. It's good. Good call.

JSC, by the way, is a legacy library that we do not use anymore. It's only there for anybody that's porting forward older projects. JSC is the old US standard. NFPA and IEEE have replaced it to follow the NFPA 79 standards and the IEEE 315, 315A standards, so just so you guys know. A little geekiness there.

So what I want you guys to see, though, this is where we say, what? Projects? In our first tab, I should say, of these project properties is what? Schematic Libraries, we want to be using-- where we're pointing to look at our icon menus, all of that good stuff. And you'll see what those things are in a second.

Now, the more interesting part, I feel like, to most people is as we get into some of these settings of actually looking at, oh, how do I want my default component tags to look? And what do I want my default wire numbers to look like? And how do I want these things to actually react when they're being inserted? So there's cross references too. If you get to styles, things like, what do my arrows look like? What do my PLCs look like? How do my wires cross? How do they tee off of each other?

So these are all standards you guys can set so that you don't have rogue engineers or designers doing whatever the heck they want inside of the drawings. And everybody's drawings looking a little different, because Bob did it this way and Tim did it this way. It's a good thing. It's a good thing to get those standards set in place. So we can define these here.

I just wanted to show you guys so that you'd experience playing with it. We don't need to change any of the settings. They're fine. I just wanted you guys to see it. So go ahead and hit OK. Don't hit Cancel, since we actually did edit that one field.

Now what I want to do is I actually want to start inserting a component. So what we're going to do together is we're going to insert a rung. We're going to insert a rung. We're going to insert a parent. And we're going to insert a child that we map to that parent. Good? Yeah? OK.

With me, come over-- if you're on the Schematic tab of the ribbon-- so we have very task-based ribbons here-- you can get to all of the vanilla AutoCAD ribbons. They're just not all by default on. But go to the Schematic tab of the ribbon. And then I want you to go over to the Edit Wires and Wire Numbers panel. And I want you to click on the Add Rung button right here.

If you look down at the command prompt, it tells you that the default wire type is a black 14 gauge. So you guys get to define what wire types you actually want in there. If you click the Wire Type button in the command prompt, this right here, you can choose whatever wire type you want. I don't care what you choose. Choose whatever you want.

And it's so slow. There we go. OK, now all you have to do to add a rung is click anywhere between the two bus lines. It does not have to be precise. You do not have to be perfect. It knows the spacing. So just click down where I am, kind of near the middle of 416, 417, and just click. And you will add a rung. You can zoom up a little bit.

Did you all get there? Pretty cool. See, the connection dots automatically added. It snapped to the proper spacing for the ladder. It knows how to do all of that. Sweet, yeah? Cool. Am I losing anybody or are we good? I don't want to go too slow. I'm losing people? Do we need to do it again? So make sure you don't click on the bus lines. It doesn't need that. You just need to snap between them.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Yeah, you can do that, actually. And I will show you how to do it, but I'm OK with you having it on 16. I told you to go between 16 or 17. What it did is it snapped to the nearest rung it could find. So that's totally fine. Yes, but we have a command called Scoot that can do that. And I'll show you that in a minute.

Are we good? I don't want to go on-- nope? Yes? OK. So now what we're going to do is we're actually going to insert a component. So go to the Icon menu. It should be your first button. It wasn't mine, because I had showed you guys the catalog browser. So go to the Icon menu in the upper left-hand corner of the Schematic ribbon. And it should open up this dialog box for us. Do you all see the NFPA Symbol Library? Yeah? Good.

AUDIENCE: Icon menu and then what?

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: I haven't gone anywhere yet. Just Icon menu.

AUDIENCE: I don't have that open.

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Oh. Just click on Icon menu. It should-- thanks, Todd. So here, you can see all the symbols that already come with the NFPA library. If you guys were actually seeing this off of my computer, I have a fun little one that says Tiff's Custom Symbols, and it has my face on it. You can create your own icon menus. It's very easy to add those different sub-menus in there. But I just wanted you guys to be able to see the core one.

So let's go together into relays and contacts. It's a single click. You don't have to double-click. Just a single click, and it'll go in here. And we'll grab the very first relay coil. Are we all this far? Good.

We'll grab the first relay coil. Now come down. And I want you just to click on the wire, just a bit in line with the one above it. You should see a light above it for 415. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just go ahead and click to get it on that wire.

It should snap to the wire. You should actually see, like you just saw on my screen, it automatically trimmed the wire. Oh! Don't hit the microphone. You should see it automatically trim it out of the middle. And then it provides us this dialog box.

What you put here is going to allow you to do an output later in reports. So the more information you give, the more you'll be able to get out of a report. The less information you give, that's fine. You're just going to have less that you can actually pull from a report. Makes sense? Now, what's the very first thing that got populated? What do you see?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: The what?

AUDIENCE: The tag.

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: The tag. Right. Because we set up that automatic tagging. So that standard format of the percent F percent N means we have the family code come in and the line reference number. So the family code is that CR, because it's a control relay-- and then the line reference number. Now, you can modify this. This doesn't have to be the only way. We have lots of replaceable parameters. We have sequential instead. If you don't use ladders and you don't want to do it sequentially like this-- or ladder reference-wise, you can do it sequentially. It doesn't have to be this, but there are lots of ways to tweak this to make it automatic. Cool, yeah?

So now we want to start talking about what we want to add here. So the description text, we're going to do that. Now, you could manually just type in here. We're, of course, not going to do that, though. We don't do manual things in here. So what you can do is click on the Drawing button. And you can see what all the other control relays in the drawing are actually saying.

Oh, my gosh. The virtual machine thing, it's so slow. Come on. So I have three safety relays already in there. I want this to be my fourth one. So I'm just going to click on the number-- whatever one. It doesn't matter which one of those. Click on it. And then just change this to the number four. Now you've got standardization. You're not retyping it. You don't have to fat-finger it. You can use your drawing to help you.

The other really cool thing that I want you guys just to look at-- click on the Defaults button. This is a text file that is linked to your drawings that you can actually build up with all of your standard text formatting that you would want to have for description text for any components for your company. So now everybody is, by a standard, using the same description. So you just build it up, add it in there.

There's even language conversion in here. So if you need to have dual language on this drawing or just a completely different language, you can do it. So you can actually switch from-- and this is slow, because the dialog box isn't coming up-- but there's many different languages in here, many different phrases. You can actually do all this.

This is not the full language convert. That's actually something that we have inside of the entire project. So you can go out to Project Settings. And you can do a full language conversion on your entire project if you needed it. This would be just for the description text.

AUDIENCE: When you make changes, does it update [INAUDIBLE]?

TIFFANY BACKMEIER: Absolutely. Absolutely. That is the beauty of this. OK, so that's description. Now, probably the most important part to everybody is being able to pull a bill of material, right? So click on that Catalog Data for me.

Now, you can, of course, go to Drawing, like we just did, and see what other catalog numbers you're using there. But let's look at that catalog database. So click the Look Up for me. And then you will see it populate. There's a default filter on this one already, so you can see that it's actually filtering by Allen-Bradley type P.

So we can go through here. And we can actually grab whatever part number we want. This is basically like a Google search. You can type in whatever you want in there. And it will search the entire catalog that's listed under control relays to do this.

This is a Microsoft Access database file, but if you came to our class this morning, we talked a lot about the SQL database as well. So it can be moved into SQL instead of Access. But by default, it is Access. But you can build this up and add your own part numbers. It is very easy to edit. I could edit right now. Do you see the pencil in the right-hand corner? I can easily edit that. We're not going to do that, though. We don't have enough time to do all those things.