Editing Title Blocks and Attributes in SOLIDWORKS Electrical

SolidProfessor - Sam Sanchez | July 4, 2016 | Comment

 

Users who wish to start new projects in SOLIDWORKS Electrical using any of the provided project templates, may want to edit or make adjustments to items in the title blocks. However, if we open the cover page for a new project, we notice that the information on the page is actually not editable.

The reason is that all of the linework and even the text, is included in the title block for this particular sheet.

If we right click on the cover page or any of the drawings, we’ll notice there is a flyout menu for the title block of the drawing. Users can modify the title block for this drawing, by clicking Open. After doing so, the title block opens as its own tab.

 

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Users can zoom in on text to that it is defined based on attributes and the text itself gets populated based on the properties that exist throughout the project.

We can now move this text to another spot on the screen, select it and change the text font, size, style, et cetera, or use the draw tab to add some more linework. We can also add text using the “Add text” tool on the draw tab, but it will not be driven by any of the project or drawing properties.

If you would like to add text that is driven from properties that exist in the project, users can do so by adding an attribute.

In the side panel, on the “Edit title block” tab, there is a folder structure with some attributes that are already defined in the project, book, folder, drawing et cetera.

The dialogue lets you know that anything here shown in blue is already on the drawing somewhere.

In the tutorial video above we created some text saying, “Creation Date.” From the projects folder, we can double click the “Creation Date” attribute and place it on the sheet.

 

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In case users would like to make the appearance of this attribute match some existing text, users can right click the text that they want this to be styled after, select “Copy properties” and then right click on the new text and choose “Apply copied properties.”

At this point, let’s return to the cover page drawing to see the effects of making these changes to the title block.

When we close the title block and return to the cover page, it still looks the same. To refresh the page, we must again right click on the cover page in the side panel and under “title block”, select “Update.”

 

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After confirming our changes, the drawing is updated and the attribute is filled in with the information in the project properties.

 

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You can learn more about SOLIDWORKS Electrical and the new capabilities in SOLIDWORKS 2016 by signing up for a free membership.

 

About the Author


Sam Sanchez is an Applications Engineer with SolidProfessor and a CSWP. Sanchez is an alumni of UC San Diego, and in her free time enjoys 3D printing and hanging out with her dog Ruby. You can see more training videos on a wide range of CAD, CAM & BIM topics at www.solidprofessor.com.