From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS Electrical
Final exports
- [Narrator] Once we are fully completed our electrical projects, in many cases we'll want to do a final output or export, say, a DWG or a PDF. So in this case, I can just jump into the Import/Export tab, and you'll see I have a number of options here, I can export to DWG, I can also import from DWG, and so on, but one of the most important ones that I usually use, is export to PDF. So I'll just click on Export PDF here, and I'll set up my PDF printer however I'd like, whatever size sheet, and so on, I'll need to specify a file name here, so where it's going to save as. I'll save it out about here. And I'll call it Final Project, or whatever the project name may be. And I can print a selection of my pages, all my pages, all the standard printing options, but what's kind of an important one to check off here, is to maybe export one PDF for the entire book, so each kind of section of the project will be printed off in a single PDF instead of a bunch of individual PDFs, and maybe more importantly is, create bookmarks and hyperlinks. So we'll see exactly what that means, but essentially that's going to create a smart PDF for us. So I'll actually be able to click on my components, and it will jump from page to page. So once I'm happy with all of these options, I'll just hit print. And it will ask me if there's been any changes to first update all my drawings before printing out, so in this case I can say update drawings. It'll take a few minutes here to update all my drawings, and then export these out to a nice packaged PDF. And then as soon as it finish it off, it should open automatically, or just check that file directory that you saved out as, and now I have my nice finished PDF that I can send this off to, print out, whatever it might be. I can run through, it should be my whole project here, so here is my line diagram, here's my schematic, second schematic, controls, and so on. So this is everything that we've been working on up until now. Now, what's really nice about this, for one thing I can click on these items, and they'll jump from page to page, so for example if I check out my motor M1 on my line diagram, I can just click on that motor M1 symbol, and it's going to jump me to my schematic symbol. Click again, and jump me back, and so forth. So you can see this is very useful, especially in more complex electrical components, like contactors and relays where there might be a whole bunch of symbols across multiple pages, I can easily jump between them, see where the associations lie, and so on. What's also very useful here, if I jump over to the left, I want to show my bookmarks, so again I checked off that option to turn on the bookmarks here, so I'm going to show these bookmarks, and what it's done, it's actually created pretty much my documents tree, and my components tree. Very similar to how we were working with this in SolidWorks Electrical, so if I expand my documents tree here, it's going to show me all of the different pages, so if I want to jump straight to my power drawing 04, I can jump there, to my PLC drawing, 08, I can jump there, connector drawing, and so on. And maybe even more useful than that, is I also have a components tree. So this is going to show me all of my electrical components that I've created, so again, maybe a relay or a contactor would be a good one to take a look at, but it shows my locations again, remember we created that main electrical closet, the motor room, the backplate and the door, so I can check all the locations, I know most of the electrical components will be on my backplate. And there's all the components I've created. My fuse, my contactors, my circuit breakers, and so on. Check out my contactor here, and again, so this is my contactor K1, maybe one of the more complex components, So I can click on the top level, when I click on any of the individual symbols, so this contactor K1, has again, six unique symbols across this whole project. So, I can check out each and every one of those, I can jump to the power contact, the relay coil, the normally open contact, normally closed contact, and so on. So it's just a very nice, easy way to jump around, that's why we call these smart PDF. It's not just as simple as something printed out, that's not really associated with each other. Again, similar idea for my origin destination arrows, I can click to those again, in this case it's a small project but imagine you have a hundred page project, where we're kind of jumping all over the place, these can be very useful, just click on the exact origin destination arrow, and it's going to jump to the destination there.
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.