From the course: AutoCAD P&ID Essential Training: User

Locating components in a P&ID drawing using Data Manager - AutoCAD P&ID Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD P&ID Essential Training: User

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Locating components in a P&ID drawing using Data Manager

- [Instructor] Searching for a particular valve or instrument in a full set of P&ID is an arduous task. It requires searching through pages of printed sheets, searching for the component, then open the correspondent drawing file to make the changes. Watch how easy it is for us to locate tags in our drawing using data manager. Let's go ahead and open drawing 1101 P&ID. So let's open data manager and I'm going to switch to our current drawing data. So let's take a look at the equipment. If we want to locate a particular piece of equipment in a congested drawing, what we have here in this upper corner is our locate tool. By coming down to the tag that you want to locate, for example if want P1003, just double click in this space in the first column beside that tag and you'll see that it takes us right to that pump. Let's try that again using the tank. We want to locate TK1004 in our drawing. Now while it's fairly easy to find equipment because it's large, the advantages come when you're looking for hand valve tags or perhaps equipment tags. So let's come down and look for our gate valves and let's locate one particular one. Let's look for HA167 and it takes us right to it. That would take a fair amount of time for us to visually check for that particular hand tag so this makes locating the tags easier. Let's go ahead and look for some instruments. We want to locate FC1003 and it's right there, 004 and it'll take us right to it. This also works the other way too. I'm going to go ahead and open 1102 and I'm going to switch to the P&ID project database. So if you're trying to locate a particular component, what we have here is the show selected items. If we toggle this on, what we can do is select a component in our drawing and in the reverse procedure, it'll take us to the corresponding data field in the database. Let's have a look. This has located E1004. Let's go ahead and look for one particular valve tag. Just click on that valve and it's located to check valve HA128. We can now quite simply go through and add the information here. This also works for line numbers. Let's look for that line segment and it takes it right to us. It also works across drawings too. So I'm going to come and close 1101 P&ID done. And while I'm in the P&ID project, I want you to watch what happens. I'm going to look for one of the heat exchangers here. I'm going to look for this particular one, remove your filters, and turn off your show all items, good tip. So if I want to locate this particular exchanger, let's pick one of these two. Notice these don't exist in the drawing that I have. They could exist in any drawing in the P&ID. We would have to go and look for that and then open that up. By double clicking here, I want you to watch what happens. Notice that it opened up the corresponding drawing and presented you with that exchanger so you don't need to know what drawing these components are contained in. If you just double click to select it, the program will find it and open the drawing and take you right to it. So as you can see with data manager, we can accomplish just filtering and locating much quicker by using database to locate the components for us.

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