Subtitles of the Movie

One of the very cool tools available to you in AutoCAD Electrical 2010 is the Title Block Setup Tool. Now you'll see there that I've actually put a Title Block around my circuit. It is actually an AutoCAD Block. It has some attributes there, so you've got here, down at the bottom, you've got Drawn, Checked, Approved and here you've got Installation, Location and Description. Now before we do anything else let's right-click on our Project, Add the Active Drawing to the Project and say Yes to the Project Default Values. There's our TITLE BLOCK SETUP TOOL drawing, it's a right-click, Properties, Drawing Properties and we'll change that Sheet number there to 03, just for sequential clarity. OK, let's have a look at this Title Block Setup Tool and what we're going to do here is basically utilize this Title Block. Now we go to our Project tab over here, there's our Project tab there and we look right across to the Other Tools Panel and we want Title Block Setup, here. Now, there are various methods of setting up your Title Blocks. You have the Project, which is specific to the project that you're linked with; you have Default wdt for any wdp file found in the Drawing folder, or you can just go for the straight Default, which is the default when neither of the above is found. Or, all link information is stored right on the Title Block. Now I'm going to Project Link this one, I'm going to click on OK. Now there's already a wdt file in there. I'm going to overwrite that. That's where I was testing this exercise, obviously before I set it up for you guys, so I'll just Overwrite that for now. I can go and Pick the Block, so there's my Block there, I Pick it, right-click to confirm. It's TITLE-A3-ELEC and I OK that. Now, this looks more confusing than it really is. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to Pick Project Value LINE1, so this is all my Project Settings. These are the Lines in my Project Settings. So for LINE1 in my Project I'm going to select INSTALLATION. For LINE2 in my Project I'm going to select LOCATION and for LINE3 I'm going to select DESCRIPTION. Now that's those three up there on the Title Block: Installation, Location, Description. LINE4 is going to be DRAWN BY; LINE5 is going to be CHECKED BY; and LINE6 is going to be APPROVED BY. So I've got INSTALLATION, LOCATION, DESCRIPTION, DRAWN, CHECKED, APPROVED. So I'll OK those now. Now I could also have Drawing Values like Drawing Number, File Name, Extension and so on, IEC Project Code, Date and Time. So I can apply those if I want to as well. I'm not going to in this case. So, I'll OK those now. They've all been applied to my Project Settings. Now, this is where it gets kind of cool because now that's been applied to my Project all I've got to do in the Project now, here and this will apply to each drawing that uses this Title Block, I've only got one drawing using the Title Block right now, but if I had 200 you could see the benefits. So it's a right-click here, like so and I go to Descriptions like that and there's LINE1, LINE2, LINE3 and so on. Now I want these to show in the Reports so I'll go down to Line6 there, so that's MASTER001 and CIRCUIT. So Installation, MASTER001; CIRCUIT is the Location. Description will be Master Circuit like so. And then we've got the Drawn, Checked and Approved, so Line4 will be Drawn, so that will be my initials let's say. Let's put somebody else's initials in for Checked and somebody else's initials in there for Approving. So when I OK that now that all applies and all I've got to do now is do a Title Block Update. Title Block Update, there's all the information, can you see that? Line1, Line2, down to Line6. It all comes through like that. I want those to update and all I do now, I'm just going to OK on the Active Drawing and look, everything updates on my Title Block. So just imagine, I've done that for Active Drawing only. If I did that for every drawing in the Project it would update the entire group of drawings listed in that Project. So that's the benefit of your Title Block Setup Tool and utilizing your Title Block Attributes.