SOLIDWORKS Electrical is an incredibly powerful electrical schematic tool. As you create these schematics, you are adding a lot of information and symbols to your design. This can lead to clutter on your sheets. One way to clean this up, is to work with layers so you can easily hide or show certain items on your sheet. One really great example of this is with cross reference lists. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, I demonstrate this technique to help clean up your drawing sheet.
Cross reference lists are anything that appears besides parent symbols. For example, a coil relay, which helps you keep track of all the contacts and how they are being used. But this adds clutter and could be confusing to users. To hide them and clean up the space on your sheet, you can put them on what’s called a non-printable layer.
To add a layer to your project, just click the layers button on the modify ribbon. From here, you will be able to add new ones to your project. These layers can be hidden or shown, whatever you set. Aside from the visibility of the layer, you can set whether or not it can be printed. Look for the “red slash through the printer” icon towards the right side of the table. This means do not print, setting the printing characteristics of your layer. You can confirm this by doing a print preview of your sheet.
Want to learn more about how to utilize SOLIDWORKS Electrical to its full potential? Sign up for a training course!
