I have been using ACADE in a controls design environment for 7 years. In my experience, I have found many best practices and workarounds as needed to complete my daily work. My first suggestions is do not go Home (do not work in the home tab).
AutoCAD Electrical has many "parallel commands" to vanilla AutoCAD. The problem is that ACADE relies on a component database which has information very specific to the application. This includes component specific data for each type of electrical device. Also, the interconnection of these components is managed in a specific way, allowing smart tracing of device to device connectivity. The "schematic" tab is where all ACADE design should originate. Erasing a block or entity in vanilla AutoCAD is acceptable, however, in ACADE, the database knows what devices are actually in the schematic. Erasing an electrical component will not remove it properly from the project. This leads to errors when adding additional devices as well as causing errors in reports generated from a design project.
The tendency to use the "home" tab because a user has previous AutoCAD experience is the hardest thing to change with ACADE users (especially those new to the software, with precious AutoCAD experience). Most design jobs will have some mechanical drawing content, which brings related work (drawing basic entities and dimension tasks are the most common). There is a solution, which is more time efficient and practical.
The right click menu is customizable very easily through the CUI command. My current menu, shown above, has many additional functions added to the default ACADE version, natively found in the "home" tab or others. I suggest that ACADE users keep a list of non-ACADE functions while working for a week. Add those most commonly used to your right click menu, as I have shown above. By doing this, users will have access to the "other" commands they need to complete a drawing without switching tabs and invoking the incorrect command to work properly in AutoCAD Electrical. A note of caution to those with smaller (laptop) displays, is to set up your menu to work with the available desktop space to not take up too much real estate, making the user need to use excessive panning or zooming of the drawing as the work.
1 Comment
