From the course: AutoCAD: Electrical Toolset

Editing with the marking menu - AutoCAD Electrical Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Electrical Toolset

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Editing with the marking menu

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- [Instructor] In this particular chapter, we're going to take a look at the AutoCAD Electrical Toolset editing commands. Now, you may remember me mentioning earlier that you really shouldn't be using your regular AutoCAD editing commands. There are editing commands within the AutoCAD Electrical Toolset. The Electrical Toolset that we're using in this case is AutoCAD Electrical 2023, the latest version. And you'll notice that we have a WDDEMO project open in the Project Manager, and I've got the drawing demo04.dwg open. So make sure that you've gone down the route of downloading the demo project folder, and then like we've done in previous chapters, we go to Open here in the Project Manager and you go and find the wddemo.wdp file for that particular project for this particular chapter. Make sure that you do that so that you've got the right project files, and also the right project for this particular chapter as well. So you select the wdp file as usual, click on Open and the project will open in the Project Manager. I'll click on Cancel because I've already got it open here in the background and I've got drawing demo04 open in the drawing area in the Electrical Toolset. Now, like I said, we're going to be looking at the editing commands. Now, the first thing we're going to look at is the marking menu. Now, you've seen me use this before but I want to go into it in a little bit more detail. So what we're going to do, we're going to zoom on the left-hand side of the left-hand ladder here. So when you zoom in, you can see that we've got the ladder rungs 406, 407, 408. And you can see we've got various things available. We've got some junction boxes, some switches, and so on. And what we're going to do here is we're just going to have a look at how the marking menu works. Now, there's lots of different tools in the marking menu. I could probably do an entire course on the marking menu to be honest but I just want to show you some of the things that run within the marking menu in your AutoCAD Electrical Toolset. So I'm going to look at LS406. Now, the benefit you have in AutoCAD Electrical is you can highlight a component, whether it's a schematic component or a panel component, and when you highlight it, you right click and the marking menu pops up. Now, what I love about this is all of the tools that you need to work with that component are on the marking menu. You can edit the component, you can delete the component, you can surf, you can retag and update, you can scoot the component along the wire. You can align the component with other components. You can move the component as well. You can also copy. You can edit the attributes of the component. You can flip it, you can insert wires or you can just exit the marking menu. Now, I'm going to pop up to Edit Component, this one here. Now, when I click on it, you can see that all the details are there in my component. You can see we've got the tag, LS406. That's obviously adopting the 406. You'll notice from the ladder in the schematic drawing. Now, it's also telling us that it's RAM 01 and it's retracted. So the LS406 tag is there. There's the retracted, there's the RAM 01. Now, what I could potentially do here is perhaps change a word, a letter in the description. That would allow me to update it, and I do all of that through the marking menu. So when I'm done, I click on OK and obviously, that would update anything within the drawing and within the project itself. Now, it's the same with wires as well. I've got a wire number there. I can right click when I'm over that wire number. I can edit the wire number. And notice, the marking menu is contextual as well. So it will always adopt the menu you need for the component you're working with as well, which is really useful. So I can edit my wire number, I can align, I can scoot. Let's click on Scoot, for example. Now I can scoot that number along a little bit, click there. It just moves it along the wire. I can do the same with 407 there and scoot it along a little bit like so, and click there and just scoot it along again like so. Really useful. We'll get into scoot and things later on. I'll just press Enter to finish now and you can see they've all scooted along the wire a little bit but that's all based on that marking menu. It saves you having to go elsewhere. So you just simply hover over a component, right click and your marking menu is right there. To come out of the marking menu, just click on Exit like so.

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