Useful, Yet Lesser-Known Features of AutoCAD Electrical

IMAGINiT Tricks Tutorial: Learn about commands related to displaying wire color and gauge labels, wire number placement, and more.

Editor's note: This tutorial courtesy of IMAGINiT Technologies.

Having worked with many engineering and manufacturing companies who use AutoCAD Electrical, I noticed an interesting usage issue. All of the users at these companies know of, and are using, the main capabilities of the software; but only a few of the users are taking advantage of some of the lesser-known features. A small group is aware of some of them, and another small group knows of others, and so on.

Most of the software users do not know that all these features exist; others simply might not know how to use them or understand how to take advantage of them. Therefore, I would like to take a quick look at some of the features that more users should start taking advantage of in their daily routine. You might be surprised by the benefits of some of these features!

Wire Color/Gauge Label

Let’s start with something simple and easy to do. It’s also very useful.

Almost every user I’ve come across has asked about being able to have this capability. They know that they’ve taken the time and effort to set up and use wires of specific color and size, and that they can extract that information in the form of a report, but they then say that it would be really nice if that information could be displayed on the drawing itself. The answer is, “Yes, it can be done” — and it’s very simple.

On the Schematic tab > Insert Wires/Wire Numbers panel, select Wire Color/Gauge Label from the drop-down list as shown below.



The Insert Wire Color/Gauge Labels dialog box displays as shown below.



To set up how the label will appear, referring to text written, text size, and leader line configuration, select the Setup button, and the Wire label color/gauge setup dialog box appears as shown below.



To change what text displays for any particular wire type (wire layer), select it in the list in the Wire Line Layers – Color/Gauge setup section, then in the Color/gauge dialog box that displays for that wire layer, modify the text as desired.

To adjust the display of any potential leader line that may get placed, modify its properties in the Leader section. Then click the OK button to accept any changes.

Once back in the Insert Wire Color/Gauge Labels dialog box, choose the Manual button in either the With leader or No leader area to place the label accordingly. In both sections, there is an option to align the label text with the wire. When using the manual option, the label gets placed based on where the user selects. When the Auto Placement option is used, all the desired wires are required to get selected, and the software will automatically place labels on every selected wire.

A few examples of the different styles of wire labels are shown below.

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