From the course: AutoCAD Electrical Essential Training

Use AutoCAD Electrical template files (DWT) to add new drawings

From the course: AutoCAD Electrical Essential Training

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Use AutoCAD Electrical template files (DWT) to add new drawings

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- [Instructor] We're staying in our WDDEMO project and as you can see I've got DEMO02.DWG still open like we've had in previous videos. Now I'm hoping you've still got the WDDEMO project open. What we're going to look at now is adding a new drawing via one of the AutoCAD Electrical template files, the dwt files. Now it's really important that you use an Electrical dwt, and if you haven't got one, you can create one from the standard templates that are provided with AutoCAD Electrical. I'll show you those in a moment. The reason why you need to use an Electrical dwt file and not just a regular AutoCAD dwt file, there's loads of attributes applied to the dwt file. Let me show you what I mean. In DEMO02, if I zoom into the bottom right corner of the title bar, just pan up a little bit, you can see there that I've got things like engineer, checked by, job number, drawn by, et cetera. Those attributes are all linked to the AutoCAD Electrical project, and it's really important that they are linked via the dwt file. So you need to make sure that you're using the appropriate dwt file from AutoCAD Electrical. I'll just double-click on the wheel there to zoom extent again. So, let's think about adding a new electrical drawing to our electrical project. We go to the Project Manager, with our project already open, we go to this icon here, new drawing. Now, as soon as I do that, I get this great big dialogue box with lots of information on it. Don't be afraid of that. All you need to worry about at the moment is the drawing file name and the template you're using. So you browse to where you want to use a template, and the template we're going to use is ACAD_ELECTRICAL.dwt. You'll see that that title block in the preview matches the title block here in the drawings. So, what we're going to do now is just apply that particular file path to this new drawing. So I click on open like that, and there's the file path in the template field here. Now I'm going to go the name of this file, and I'm just going to call it DEMO99. So demo, like that, and 99. Now the benefit I have there is, the location is here, and I can browse to any location. You want to make sure you're using your AutoCAD Electrical project folder location, which in my case is the demo folder that I mentioned previously. And you can see there it is there, CatLinkedinLearningDemoDEMO99.dwg, that's where it's going to go, that's the name of the file that is going to be saved. Now those are the only bit that I need to worry about, but there is a little tick box that I must mention here. For reference only. If you click that box, the new drawing will not link to the project database. So you might just have a standard drawing, with a title block and all it's got is a list of drawings and drawing numbers. And you don't want that linked, it's just an AutoCAD table, and it's like the front sheet of all your drawings. So you might want to list that as for reference only so it doesn't link to the database. In the Project Manager on the left here, the little dwg logo will be gray instead of the regular blue and yellow if it's for reference only. This one is for reference, so I've got the name, and I've got the template, that's the only info you need to create a new drawing. The rest of it you can add at a later date if you want to. So I'm going to click on okay, and you can see what'll happen now is in AutoCAD Electrical you'll see this little sort of updating pop up, that's updating the AutoCAD Electrical project database. And we're now in our DEMO99 drawing. If I zoom in here like this, you can now see, look, there's some information there that's come in. There's a sample project, schematics and panel layout, there's a file path, and bits and pieces there. I'll just double-click on the wheel to zoom extent again. That information is listed in the project information, the attributes in the dwt suck that information out of the project, put it into the title block. That's why you need to use an Electrical dwt file. Now if you haven't got one, just go to that standard template folder and copy and paste to a new location and set it all up the way you want it to work, and then put it back in that template folder so that you know where it is. That's one of the easiest ways at making sure it's there. Now we're just going to quickly jump over to the projects here in the Project Manager, there's our DEMO99 drawing, I'm going to just click and drag and move that up into the schematic listing like so, and then what I can do is I can move it down a little, if I want it just to be underneath the demo, I just set it there like that. So it's now at the bottom of the list in numerical order, and it's open, and it's ready to be drawn on. And that's how you add a new drawing, from a template, an AutoCAD Electrical template, into your projects.

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