From the course: AutoCAD Electrical Essential Training

Create a new electrical drawing in a project

From the course: AutoCAD Electrical Essential Training

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Create a new electrical drawing in a project

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- [Instructor] When you're working in your AutoCAD Electrical projects, in this case our WD Demo Project, you might need to add a new drawing to that project. Now we want to add a drawing to the project that basically has the same kind of setup as the rest of the drawings in the project. So what we would do there is we would use a regular AutoCAD electrical template. Now I've covered this in some of the previous chapters where it's got to be a template that has those AutoCAD Electrical attributes applied to it. So, the next part of the workflow is that you want to add a new drawing. So what we do is we go over to the Project Manager. We click on New Drawing, and it brings up the New Drawing dialog box. So with the template we make sure that we're browsing to the right template, so we click on Browse, and I'm going to use ACAD ELECTRICAL.dwt. That's one of the ones that comes with AutoCAD Electrical. My suggestion is if you need an AutoCAD Electrical template, copy one of these. Then it's got all the right attributes, give it a new file name, tweak it as you see fit for your particular purposes. So I'm going to click on Open there and that's added. I'm now going to add the name of the drawing as well, which is going to be DEMO 99. Now if you have already just left open the WD Demo Project from previous chapters, you'll remember that we've already done DEMO 99, so it will try and overwrite it and it could cause some errors. So if you've already done DEMO 99, and it's still there in your WD Demo Project, just give it a different file name. So there it is there, LinkedIn Learning Demo, DEMO99.dwg. Now if I want to add other bits of information to it I can. I can give it a Description, I can give it a Project Code, an Installation Code, Sheet Values, and so on. So what I might do there is give it a Sheet Value. It's going to be DEMO 99, so it'll be Sheet 99 for example. That's just another property that I can add to this particular drawing if I want to. So I'll click on Okay like so, and off we go and that drawing is now being added as you can see, DEMO 99 has now been added to the project and you can see that little updating bar comes up which means the project is updating in the background. So if I go to, AutoCAD Electrical DEMO 99 you can see it's there on the title bar. If I zoom in on the title block now you'll see if I pan upwards a little bit, that sheet number 99 has gone in and it's gone against the standard settings of the title block so that we now had 99 sheets of 10 sheets. And I did that deliberately just to kind of add a little bit of humor there. So that particular attribute, that sheet number that I put into that drawing properties is there. And that's what links to the DWT file when you bring in a new drawing into your project. I'll just double click now on the wheel to zoom extents again. You'll also notice in the project here, that our DEMO 99 is quite happily there. I'm just going to bring that in so it sits underneath DEMO 07 like that, it's in the right place in the list, it's in the schematic drawings, and we are ready to go. So we've added our new drawing to our AutoCAD Electrical project. So you can see that workflow, we open up the project first using the WDP file. We then access the drawings in the project via the Project Manager. And if we want to add a new drawing, we use an AutoCAD Electrical DWT from the Project Manager again. You'll notice I'm using everything AutoCAD Electrical. I'm not using any of the regular AutoCAD commands to do this, I'm doing it all through the AutoCAD Electrical interface and it's really important that you do that all the time. Especially when you're adding new drawings using that AutoCAD Electrical DWT file.

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