Only One. AutoCAD: Feeling the Spark for the AutoCAD Electrical Toolset

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Welcome to AU 2018, your very first class. Unless you've snuck into an 8:00 AM class and then snuck back out to come in here, but I'm assuming this is your first class. So welcome.

My name is Tiffany Bachmeier. I will be your speaker today. I am a consulting practice manager at Autodesk. So I lead a team of consultants that focus on enterprise software management and emerging technologies, which is just a really long title to say that I have a very mixed skill set on my team of a wide variety of awesome consultants that have awesome skills.

So but I am also the resident AutoCAD Electrical expert at Autodesk. So I am thrilled to bring you this class. We were just talking about, it's kind of a small track for electrical, so oftentimes, I see the same faces again in my other classes. So I don't know if you're signed up for that, but I've got another one tomorrow and another one on Thursday, so hopefully I'll see you guys all there.

But for those of you that are in here for the first time, I do want to just get a feel for where everybody is. How many of you actually have AutoCAD Electrical installed? It's part of your toolset. Wow. Quite a bit of you. OK, that's good. And how many of you have actually tried it? You're maybe using it, but it's still being used as regular AutoCAD? Maybe you've passed a couple of buttons? All right. There's a few.

Have you installed it but not really sure you've configured it correctly? Are you seeing some manufacturers but maybe not all that you were expecting, or symbol libraries, any thoughts on that? Randy, I saw that hand raise and I know that is not true. Another resident AutoCAD Electrical expert in the back there, and he's going to apparently haggle me with the hand raises.

All right. Very cool. So for the rest of you, who is in here that hasn't installed it, but are just really curious about AutoCAD Electrical, hoping to maybe implement it? OK. Awesome. Great. So we've got a good mix. So this is a beginner's class. My goal with this class is to help you all see the benefits in how you could quickly implement Electrical, if you wanted to.

It's to give you some tips and tricks on that, and to take you through some of the core features. Obviously in 90 minutes, you're not going to be experts yet. But I'm going to get you as close to that as possible, so when you get back home and you're back in your offices, you guys can start actually installing and setting things up to be the most productive that you can.

Now, the idea of the Toolsets themselves-- when they first came out, the idea was that you can toggle between any of the AutoCAD toolsets. So what we called AutoCAD Verticals are now Toolsets within AutoCAD. That doesn't mean, though, you're toggling within your actual AutoCAD. There's not a pulldown and you're switching between them that way.

You still have to install them as their individual counterparts, but it does mean that your subscription allows you access to all of them. So you're getting Architecture, and Electrical, and Mechanical, and so on. So one of the things I'm going to show you here are some screenshots of the installation for Electrical, and I just want to make sure everybody knows some of the things that you have to do to configure it.

Because if you just install it out-of-the-box without actually opening in a configuration, you don't get all of the libraries, and all of the manufacturers and catalog information that we're expecting to see. So those are some of the things I want to talk about in here.

If I get through all of this in 90 minutes and we still have some time, I'm going to take you through whatever else I can to get you up-to-speed as possible. And I'm also happy to take as many questions. I know we've already been talking up here and asking questions. Sure.

AUDIENCE: Are these slides going to be available?

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Yes. So I haven't actually uploaded this to the website yet, but I will right after this class. There's also a handout that has tons of information on getting started, and even some exercises that you can do with it, as well as I'll show you this-- a little sneak peek of it-- but there is an upload for a PDF version of this. This is a quick reference guide for AutoCAD Electrical paths.

Now, this is the standard pathing. I'm going to talk to you here about network pathing, for being able to work together with multiple people, which I'm sure most of you will do. But this gives you an idea of all the different support files and things that Electrical provides you that you can customize and you can work with to make it unique for your company.

So there are a few of these though, laminated, so I'll be passing them out as we do some things towards the end, but just know that you all have access to it in PDF form on the website.

OK, so let's talk about the benefits of Electrical in general compared to vanilla AutoCAD. Let me ask that question, too. How many people are doing electrical controls designed today, or are trying to use electrical, but in the past have used just vanilla AutoCAD for it? And how many of you are using something else? Maybe it's EPLAN, maybe it's Promise-E. OK, so much less.

All right. So my focus topic is really around AutoCAD to AutoCAD Electrical, but we can also talk about other software packages and questions you might have on comparisons and things like that. So these are obviously the things that take a little bit longer with vanilla AutoCAD. It's a lot of manual. You can see the word "manual" being repeated on this slide over and over again.

Manual creation of symbols, manual tagging, manual cross-referencing, manual checking, and editing, and reporting tools. And that's the hard part, right? So when we get to the actual productivity benefits of AutoCAD Electrical, that's where we start seeing all of the automatic things. We have over 2,000 symbols that come with AutoCAD Electrical. We have automatic tagging. We have real time cross-referencing, automatic reports-- and we'll look at some of those reporting tools, and I'll show you those.

And I have this in caps because it's so simple, but it's one of my absolute favorite things about Electrical is this title block utility. When I first started, back when AutoCAD Electrical was first a product within Autodesk, so back in 2004-- before that, it was a purchase. If anybody's ever heard of WD Via, that was what it was before.

But when we brought it into our family of products, I actually used it simply for title block updating. I downloaded a 30-day trial. I was back in the industry. I worked in conveyor design before I became a consultant. And I had over 500 drawings I needed to update, but they were pretty much all the same project. I'm sure some of you can probably relate to that.

And I just needed to update all the title blocks with different information, because they were different customer needs, and we needed to put that in. My boss placed it in front of me and said, all right. This is probably going to take you a week or two. And I look at it, and I'm like, I am not manually typing out all of these. It wasn't hard, but it was going to be mind-numbing.

And so I started looking into it. And I didn't want to have to write a script of my own. I wasn't comfortable with that back then. And sure enough, I found out AutoCAD Electrical. I downloaded the 30-day trial, threw all of my drawings into a project file, which I'll be talking about here in a second, and I was able to update the title blocks in less than an hour.

Dropped them back off to my boss, and he said, how on Earth did you do this this fast? I said, AutoCAD Electrical, and you're buying it for me. And he's like, yes, I am. So that's just a little history for me. So that's why I have it in caps, because it's just such a simple thing, but even something that simple just shows you the benefits of what Electrical can do for you.

And the last thing, just to kind of give you a little more teaser for why this can be so beneficial for you before we actually head into all the different tools it has, this is a productivity study done back in 2015 just comparing time-- how long it takes to do something in vanilla AutoCAD versus Electrical and the amount of savings.

And you can see some massive reductions. Creation of new designs, 84% speed increase. Editing, 77% faster. And then the risk of errors, massive reduction of errors just because of all the automation and not having to manually see, OK, I just updated this symbol on this page. What page is the other one on? Let's see, I've got a parent here, a child here. Where am I going to go find them? Electrical is doing all that for you. So that's really the benefit.

Hopefully most of you know that and that's why you're here. You're curious about it. But I just wanted to give you that to think about.

So how do we start? How do you get off on the right foot with Electrical? And yes, I know these screenshots are from Product Design Suite Ultimate. It's because that's typically what I'm installing, because I'm installing multiple products at one time. But ignore that part. The key here is the AutoCAD Electrical 2019 that you're seeing.

But if you actually are used to seeing this screen, maybe you've seen it collapsed when you've gone to install software before-- and by the way, if this isn't what you do, you have an IT person that does this for your company, you need to express this to them. You need to tell them that these things need to be configured into the deployment so that you can make sure that everybody's getting the same setup to Electrical, because this is an important part of it.

Again, like I said, if you just install it out-of-the-box-- this is still out-of-the-box, but if you install it without even opening up this configuration list, you will only get a few manufacturers. You will only get the NFPA library. You're not going to get all of the tools that come with Electrical because we just don't install those by default. You have to actually choose them.

So what happens, if you're not familiar with this screen when you're going to install software, is where it says Autodesk AutoCAD Electrical 2019, you actually click on that, and that expands to show you this configuration list. I don't have screenshots of every single thing in the install path, but the key things is what I wanted to show you.

So you can see here there's quite a few manufacturers. Obviously, I didn't scroll through this whole list. You're only seeing A through E, and just the start of E, really. I know this says not recommended. Keep in mind that's just because if you're installing on your C drive, it can take up a decent amount of space. It's a pretty big file of all the different manufacturers.

So it doesn't mean it's not recommended at all. Feel free to install all the manufacturers, especially if you're going to put it in a network drive area. But that is one thing I always want to tell people. That's how you get all of the manufacturer data. You need to actually choose those. And you can just go through the list and choose specifically what your company uses.

Now , the next page here, or scrolling really, if we were going through it, is how you define what drawing standards you use. So in AutoCAD Electrical, we actually get libraries for the US standard in both imperial and metric form, so we have NFPA and IEEE. There's also the international standard with IEC, along with the fact that we have Chinese, Japanese, and Australian standards that all come with the software, as well.

So lots of different libraries, and you choose what your standard library is going to be here. NFPA is obviously the US standard in imperial form. JIC is old legacy standard. It's still there if people are still using that from older versions of the software. But if you're doing this for the first time, encourage you to use NFPA. It's the more updated library.

And then the key here is this little section right here that says, Please define a location for your data. By default, it's going to your C drive. But if you want to share these libraries with other people within your company, which is typically the case-- typically, it's more than one person using the same libraries and catalog information-- that's where we need to start defining where you want to put those.

So if you do this from the onset, you do it from here in the install, and you create a deployment for that, then everybody can get that same install and everybody will be pointing to the same paths. If you do it after the fact, there's a little bit more work that has to be done around something called the environment file and all the different pathing that we have to point to.

And there's a little more chances for things to break, and you have to go back and fix them, and figure out where to link all of those different files to. So it's just a little bit more effort if you do it after the fact than if you do it right out of the install. So that's my advice to you. So you can put that on a network share. If you guys are using Vault-- that's our data management package-- you can also set this up to be all included inside of Vault. So that's the other really big benefit.

Then you bring it local to sit on your local workspace for Vault on your own computer, so you're not working over a network drive with all of those files. But you're always having that backup of the main file living inside of inside of Vault, so everybody's sharing that. So another benefit if you are using our data management package.

If you are interested in more of that information, I am teaching an implementing class on Thursday. I'm not going to dive too far into that here, but I just wanted to introduce it to you all. Yeah, yeah?

AUDIENCE: Is it possible to do more than one standard?

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Yes. So this is our standard. This is you define your main standard, but in the next screenshot, yep, absolutely you can say, I want to install all of these other libraries, too. I always install-- oop. Forgot I had a microphone there. I always install all of them. And you can switch, then, per project.

You can say, you know what? My standard is NFPA, but on this particular project I am working with a customer in Germany, and they want IEC, and so you're going to use IEC at that point. And so by installing all of them, you have the ability to add per-projects different libraries that you want to be able to utilize, so absolutely. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Is it possible to install these libraries after the program has already been installed?

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: You can, yep. So you can go back in. And if you do a repair-- or not a repair, why am I blinking? Not a reinstall.

AUDIENCE: Modify.

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: The modify. The Add and Remove Features, that's what I was trying to think of. Thank you very much. You can do repairs, obviously, if you have errors. But the Add and Remove or the Add and Modify is going to help you with those features. And when you go into that, you can go step back through all of these and you can choose to add manufacturers. Yep, you can.

Again, though, if you're not that far down the road of installing, I would almost recommend you go back and just create a deployment for it, and just uninstall your current version and reinstall so that you have everybody on the same page, and you're not having to do that on every user's computer with that Add and Modify. So but yes, it can be done.

And then you can see here, after I choose the additional libraries, I have another area where I can define where I want the symbol library. So those two locations where the path is, one is for the catalog database and one is for the symbol libraries. And that brings along all the support files with them that would follow along, that would normally go out into C drive locations for support files. Instead, they'll all sit on a network drive for you. Make sense? So far, so good?

OK. That's installation. Once you get there and you're actually ready to head into AutoCAD Electrical, I gave you a little glimpse of this already. The key to AutoCAD Electrical functioning like you want it to, with all of the intelligence, is the project file. It's the number one thing. There is a whole lot of other stuff we can talk about that makes things intelligent inside of it, but none of it works unless you have all of your drawings being consumed by a main project file.

So that's the key functionality. Now, project files are really just notepad files. If you were to go into them and take a look at them, they don't really mean a whole lot to you. This is what it looks like up in the upper-right there. But what that is is it's filling out all of the project properties and the information associated, including the drawings, and it's registering all of that inside this little wdp file extension. And that's what's driving everything.

I'll show it to you inside of Electrical here in a second, but that's really what it's all about. It's keeping all those drawings connected. It allows you to speak back and forth between drawings. And on that note, if you need a drawing to talk to another drawing, that's how you decide what the project file is. So your projects could be two drawings. They could be 200 drawings.

Totally depends on what it is you're trying to do, but the key is-- because I get asked a lot, well, how do I define what the project is? If a drawing needs to talk to another drawing, it should be included inside that same project file. So cross-referencing information, schematic-to-panel drawings, all of that.

All right. And then some of those line labels that you saw on that little text file I just showed you are actually the delineations of what selections you choose in this dialog box, the Project Properties. So this dialog box is really powerful. It defines what symbol libraries you're using for Electrical. It defines standards, like how do I want my tagging to be for components, for wires? How do I want cross-referencing to look?

How do I want my wires to cross? Do I want them to loop? Do I want them to cut through? Do I want them to break so that they show there's a little break line there? You're not going to have to do any of that manually. That's all automatic with Electrical, as long as you define all of those properties. So that's the really important part about this dialog box.

Again, I'll show it to you when we get into the software, but that's where you're seeing things, even arrow styles. How do I want my arrows to look? Things like that. So that's how you can set standards for everybody in your company to be doing the same thing and the same drawing so that everything looks the same when it comes out.

And then this is the Project Manager on its own, where you can see the list of the actual project file at the top. That's what's bold here. This is my active project. And then we can even do folders within it. This is not a Windows folder. It's just a folder structure inside of Electrical to allow us to control groups of drawings.

So let's say you do have 200 drawings in a project, and you know that you need them to all be able to speak to one another, but really, you want certain ones to be able to operate together as a group. You can put them into separate folders like that, and you can actually run project-wide commands on just a folder group. It doesn't have to be the whole project, even though we use the word project-wide.

Project-wide just really means more than one drawing. Does that all make sense? Kind of? Is it just far too early, you guys? You look engaged, but you all look a little tired. You're like, [YAWNS]. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Can you add drawings from the Vault into the project here?

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Yeah. So there's a couple of different ways to do it. You can start a project from the beginning, if you have Vault, and then that project will check into Vault along with all the drawings as you do it. Or if you for some reason created that drawing separately from the project, you can add a drawing to the project and have it be consumed by that from Vault.

Typically what people are doing though is, and you can't obviously see it here, but when I get into Electrical, there's a separate ribbon that says Vault. And you'd be checking in-- you'd already be signing into Vault through that. And as you create a project and you put drawings into it, that whole thing will get consumed up to Vault.

There's some really cool stuff with that. I'm probably not going to spend a lot of time in this class on it, but just know the functionality between Vault and AutoCAD Electrical is insanely powerful. You don't have to have the whole project checked out to one person. Multiple people can work in that project at the same time. If it's referencing one drawing and you're on that, and it goes out to reference another drawing, it will auto checkout that other drawing, make that change, and then check it back in to still allow flexibility. There's some really cool stuff that it does.

We're going to spend a little bit more time on that if you guys come to the electromechanical class I'm teaching tomorrow around Electrical Vaults and Inventor. If we have more time at the end, our plan is actually just to talk a little bit more about Vault in general with Electrical. We get a lot of questions around that, so yeah, but that's a great question.

So that's the project manager. Now, when you create a brand new project, you defined things like where the location of that project's going to live. Again, if you're using Vault, it would be automatically accessing that Vault workspace because you'd be predefined to that. But most of the time, this probably wouldn't be a C drive file. You'd see it out on a network drive for somebody to share.

And then you can even copy settings from another project file. That doesn't mean copy all the drawings. That's actually a different command, but we can do that, as well. This is more like just copying all those project properties over so that you're mimicking that same info that you already did on the last one.

The drawing lists-- we've already kind of talked about this a bit, but there's quite a few right-click options on both an individual drawing, and then when you go up to the project level of being able to define things like that folder structure, you can drag and drop things in and out of folders. And I'll show you some of those different things.

There's also a really awesome command for publishing. How many people know the publish command in vanilla AutoCAD? Obviously how you can print more than one drawing at a time, or publish to a PDF. Our publishing side of Electrical accesses that same publish, but predefines it to grab everything inside your project file. Much easier, exactly. You don't have to do it yourself and find all of them and add it to the list.

And then on top of that, you can actually plot it to a PDF form with hyperlinks so that that same time cross-referencing that we see inside of Electrical, somebody that doesn't have Electrical can still see and navigate through all of your drawings by clicking on, say, a parent and then automatically being sunk to that child in the same PDF. So there's some really cool things with that, too, so some neat functionality there.

I'm going to show you this when I go live in the software in a second, but the Surfer-- again, whenever I'm demoing Electrical, it's the first thing I show people for understanding the relationship of drawings to one another within a project. So what you're seeing on this screenshot is that there are four different symbols within this project that are all connected to one another, and they're across multiple sheets.

You can see on there sheet 4, sheet 6, and sheet 9. And it's all the same symbol being referenced with either parent-child relationships or a footprint symbol, so the actual physical representation of that symbol. By the way, when we say panel, it doesn't actually have to be an enclosure panel. I said I was used to being conveyor design. It could be the mechanical display of your conveyor and where your electrical devices are on that.

It's just the physical representation of your schematics that you're designing here. So that's what panel drawings are. And that's what I'm seeing with that little footprint symbol. That pound symbol is telling me that that's a footprint symbol for me out in my panel drawing. So this is really the power behind that project file. All right.

And then the last thing is the Copy Project. So I said before, we could copy the project properties. This is copying the whole project. So when I typically encourage people when they're going through their implementation of Electrical, and you start figuring out how you want to define everything, you start defining your tagging formats, and your wiring information, and all of that.

I encourage people to build a template project, not just template drawings like we're used to-- bless you-- like a dwt file, but actually a full template project. And maybe you have five of them as a company. Maybe you have five standard projects that you do. And depending on how you guys work, it might be customers you have, or internal customers to your company, whenever you get asked to build a project up.

But when you do that, the idea is you get those all set up as template projects, and then you copy those template projects in for whatever your next project is that you're being commissioned to do. And you just make the adjustments that you need to to that. So you're not reinventing the wheel every time, you're just making those minor adjustments.

We have lots of tools to do that. Lots of automatic. There's swapping tools to swap blocks out globally throughout the project. Maybe your standard template project has limit switches and you need proximity switches in place of that. You can do that. You don't have to manually go out there and delete them and insert the next one. You don't have to do that.

Maybe you just need to find a manufacturer you used in that one and swap it with a different manufacturer, but the drawings stay the same. We have project-wide tools to do that. So the goal is you can copy the projects this way, and it's more powerful than a Windows copy because it actually looks at all support files, which I'm going to talk about later, and makes sure it brings all those support files with you.

So things like the custom files that you can do for your corporate standards, the title black files that link everything to it, even tomorrow's class when I show you EMX, if you're coming, the electromechanical workflow file comes with that, too. So there's lots of things that this Copy Project handles that's more powerful than just, say, a Windows copy.

Are we good so far? How are we doing? Yeah? Everybody's nodding. OK.

So I don't PowerPoint you to death, let's go out to Electrical for a second here and let's just take a look. So you can see in my screen here, and that is the beauty of a mouse on a podium, just [INAUDIBLE] it all the way down. So you can see inside of this drawing, or inside of the whole setup to AutoCAD Electrical here that I have my project manager over here on the left-hand side, and I can see my drawing set here. I'm going to switch drawings.

So here's the project file that I was telling you about. If I right-click on this project file-- is it the podium? There we go-- and I go to my Properties, this is what I was telling you about. This is the power behind being able to set standards. So I can define my Symbol Library for this. You can see it's going to my NFPA. I know that's kind of an eye chart, but you can see that.

Component tagging-- so you define things like I want all my component tags to be a family code-- that would be something like CR for control relay, and then a line reference number. Or if you do them sequentially, you just want CR1, 2, 3, 4, you can define that, too. You can define all sorts of different standards in here. Wire numbering, like I mentioned, cross-referencing for how that looks between parent-child relationships.

The styles I was telling you about-like arrows, and how wires loop and cross. And even standard format. What's my standard ladder width? What's my standard spacing? You can define all of that. So again, everybody that's working at your company is doing the same thing within the project. So that's a good thing. So that's project properties.

And then just to show you again the power of the project file, this is the connection. If I take this control relay and I right-click and I go to the Surfer, and you see that same dialog box I just showed in that screenshot. I can double-click on this and have it jump to-- this was on the same page, the child component on the same page. Here's a child component on a different drawing.

And this is where, if I were doing this in Vault, it would automatically check out that drawing, check it back in as I leave it. And if I move this, you can see that there, and then I can even go out to the panel and it zooms me right up on that device. It's the CR409 on the panel. So that's really the power of the project file.

And that's why we consume all the drawings into this one area. And you can see I actually have two folders here, one for schematics, one for panel. And I have my drawings separated as such in this list Make sense? Good so far? All right. Oh, yes. Question.

AUDIENCE: So how does that affect [INAUDIBLE] How does that affect [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Great question. So AutoCAD electrical will keep track of things like that. So there's something in the background of AutoCAD Electrical called a scratch database. You don't ever have to think about it, but it's keeping track of all changes, all things happening, all devices in the drawing at the same time. You have one on your computer. Whoever has it open in another computer has that, as well. All things are being tracked.

So let's say you have drawing1 open and I have-- I keep forgetting that's there-- drawing4 open, as you can see on the screen. If you do something to drawing1 that needs to update on drawing4, it's actually going to tell you that somebody else has that open right now. So there's this area right here, this preview pane. This shows me either a preview of my drawing-- just to show you, so if I highlight any one of these drawings, it shows me an image.

Or if I switch over to Details, it actually shows me things like the file name, the status of it. If I go up to the one that I'm on, it says it's locked by me and my computer name. So if you run a command, it will tell you that a drawing was not actually available. It will tell you actually who it's locked by, and you can either, A, call me up and say, hey, I need to access that drawing. Can you get out of it for a second?

Or as soon as it becomes unlocked, you can run an update again and it will track all that stuff. You're not going to lose changes or have any issues with that. But it's designed actually to allow multiple people to work in the same drawing set. Especially because you deal with things, like I said, if you have 200 drawings in a project, you probably have more than one engineer working on it or one drafter working on it.

So it's designed to do that. It's designed to keep that task list running of understanding all of the changes and edits to it, but it actually communicates with you on that. It will tell you. Same thing if I were to do a project-wide command and try to hit all drawings in the project, and you have one of them open, it will do all of them and tell me one was locked and it couldn't do it. And then again, I could call you up, or I could wait for you to close out of it, and I could rerun those commands. It keeps track of all that stuff.

AUDIENCE: Is there a way to-- keeping it updated automatically without having to wait for them to get out of it?

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: No, because at that point, what if they made changes to that same drawing? And now you're not getting their changes. So yeah, there's not where it blends them, no. No, no, no. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: So [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: It can. It doesn't have to.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] go off of a [INAUDIBLE] an Excel spreadsheet. And read the Excel spreadsheet [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Ah, yes. So here's some things about that. So I don't know if you all heard her question. She was asking, if I have my tagging format to read wrong references, what if I wanted to predefine all those tags in an Excel spreadsheet and have it just automatically tag things? We have something called Import/Export Data here. That's what this tab of the ribbon is for. There's a lot of power on this tab, a lot of really cool things that can be done.

And one of those is actually being able to send to a spreadsheet and from a spreadsheet. So if you wanted to send your whole project to a spreadsheet and edit it via the spreadsheet, and then bring it back in to update, you can absolutely do that. That will overwrite any of your other settings. The key is to be careful that you don't run something like the project-wide Update and Retag and then have it go back to all of your settings of what you have inside the Project Properties.

So if you're going to do something different than those settings in the Excel spreadsheet, just be careful with some of these commands. My advice would be, anything that you put inside the spreadsheet, make sure it mimics what your settings are here. And then that way if anybody runs it, it's still going to function properly.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] So some of it just uses the same [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Which is fine.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] was autotag and [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Fair enough. Yeah. Would they possibly be off of, I don't know, an IO number or things like that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: So if that's the case--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: So if that's the case, just know that you can actually say, search for PLCIO address. So if you have that setting already in there, it will still do it even if you run that project-wide update, just in case. So you're good. Yep. It'll keep you safe there. Yep. Good questions. Really good questions.

So heading back to the PowerPoint home-- how am I on time? OK. So I'm going to jump back into Electrical pretty quickly here. So the other power obviously that everybody typically looks for in Electrical is the speed of creation of your drawings. So the project file is helping you make sure that cross-referencing is happening, that you have error checking that's going on, that there's things that you don't have to do manually anymore.

But then when you actually get to inserting symbols and wires, that's the power of all of the library files that we have. So you're seeing a list here of those same libraries that you saw in my installation screenshot so that you can take a look at that, and that can actually go through and choose which ones you want. I obviously chose all of them, so you're seeing all of them there.

It's a bit of an eye chart, but we'll just see how well you're able to pay attention to all of this. And totally fine if you didn't catch it, but do you see additional libraries in there that weren't in that list that I checkmarked in my installation screenshots? Yeah?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Yeah. You guys are paying attention. So yes, there are pneumatic, hydraulic, and P&ID symbol libraries that automatically come with the software, too. You don't choose to install them. They automatically come in with the install. And they're called peer devices to AutoCAD Electrical, and you can actually use them, create those same drawings that you would be doing, maybe in a different package, but include them as a part of your electrical project and they can reference their schematic symbols at the same time.

So again, like I said, they're peer-to-peer devices. So they can carry the same tagging information and they can do that. Yes, Randy?

AUDIENCE: That was my question [INAUDIBLE].

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Excellent. Go to Randy's class this afternoon. Perfect. So yeah, really powerful stuff there, too. I always like to point that out because I get a lot of people that'll call me and say, I'm using AutoCAD P&ID. How do I connect that to my AutoCAD Electrical? And I say, use the P&ID instead of Electrical. So there are those other packages that can do some of that functionality.

But if you have those basic drawing sets and you want them to talk to your Electrical projects, I highly encourage you to just do them all inside of the same package. Cool? All right. And then on the right-hand side, again, if I chose my library as NFPA, which I did, you're seeing what is called my icon menu. And this is how I grab symbols.

Is it customizable? You betcha. Do you see my little face right there? So that's my funny little add-on. You can obviously add any PNG image you want. It certainly doesn't have to be my face. But that is how you can create custom symbols for your company. So you can absolutely build up a library full of custom symbols.

Now, my advice to you is don't reinvent the wheel. We have push buttons, and relays, and switches. Don't build new ones. Yes, it maybe doesn't look like the engineer in your office who's been doing it since '98, and they drew their own push button, but guess what?

AUDIENCE: 1898.

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Or 1898. It is, however, standard based off of the IEEE standards and the NFPA '79 standards that are set by the US. So guess what? Then everybody has the same push buttons. So that's my advice. If you have to, because that guy's going to throw a huge fit about it, you can do it. My point is more build the custom symbols for the really unique symbols that you have as a company. Don't worry about it for all of the little things.

So that's my advice. Doesn't always work. Sometimes people have to do it anyway, but that's my advice about custom symbols. We have a really great utility called the Symbol Builder that makes it super easy to do this. So really what AutoCAD Electrical blocks are that make them intelligent, they're just AutoCAD blocks with very specific attributes.

So if you're really good in AutoCAD and you know blocks and attributes, that's all it is. Electrical is fully AutoCAD, it just makes it all a little faster and easier. It combines a lot of the manual things that we have to do in vanilla AutoCAD and makes them very fast, quick commands inside of Electrical. So same thing goes with block functionality.

The intelligence comes out of the very specific attributes that we have, including even attributes for how wires attach, and that's how it knows how to automatically break wires and have them trim out where they're supposed to and things like that. So nothing crazy fancy in the background, it's just all about those intelligent attributes.

And with that said, I'm going to take you right back into the software to show you some of that. So just to give you an example of parent-child relationships and assigning wires, let's say I come down here and I want to add another rung to this ladder. Super, super easy. There's actually an Add Rung command. Makes it really fast and easy.

Wires, as well, are layers. They're just AutoCAD layers. But they're intelligently told to AutoCAD Electrical in a dialog box called Create and Edit Wires that tells you all of the wires that are within your drawing. So if I come down here to Wire Type, I can switch between any of them that I put in here. Now, a typical customer probably has more like 40 different wire types in here-- all the different colors and gauge sizes. I only have three for demonstration purposes.

But let's say I want that red 18 gauge wire to be my rung. All I have to do-- watch how casually I click. I'm not being specific at all about where I clicked. But it knows, based off of settings that I have, that I have rung spaces there. It's going to jump to the nearest rung that it can. It's going to automatically make those connection dots because that's in my project properties. So it knows all of that stuff.

So that's how easy it was to add a wire. Now if I want to go add a symbol, let's say I'm going to do the parent-child relationship that we just saw, the relays and contacts. So if I go in here and I choose a relay coil, and I come down and I zoom up here and place it on my drawing, you can see it's automatically starting to tag it. It says CR417 because that's the particular line number I'm on, and that's the setting. I have for my tagging information.