This is the continuation of SOLIDWORKS Electrical Data Reuse capabilities (Part 2)

SOLIDWORKS Electrical always helps the designers with the ease of automation and intelligence. There are different design re-use techniques in SOLIDWORKS electrical which cover all the essential needs of a designer, which are mentioned below:

Macros
Project macros
Duplicate project
Snapshot
Paste special

In our previous blog, we discussed topic 3, duplicate project. Today, we wrap up our series by covering topics 4 and 5, Snapshot and Paste Special.

4. Snapshot:

The “Snapshot” feature is popular and very important. If we are working on a project and we want to save the project at some level, we can do it by a snapshot. Whenever we revise the project we can take the snapshot of the actual project before going ahead. These snapshots are projects which are saved and can be re-used as new projects whenever required.

Figure 12 – Snapshot & Snapshot Manager

Figure 13 – Snapshot manager and manual snapshot

It has Event type as “manual” because we manually created the snapshot.
We can set the days after which we want to create the snapshot of this project. See figure 15
We can check the box if we want the snapshot after each revision. See figure 15

Figure 14 – Snapshot after revision

Take snapshot after revision.

Figure 15 – Automatic snapshot

Now the event type is Revision Verified.

Figure 16 – Restore snapshots

We can restore any of the snapshots as a new project until the project is not deleted permanently.

5. Paste Special:

We have the option to do a conventional copy and paste in SOLIDWORKS but going one step ahead, SOLIDWORKS can help to paste the copied items as “paste special”. We can copy any symbol or circuit by Ctrl+C and right click to find the paste special, it is to be remembered that we don’t need to right click and paste special for macros as it pops up directly as we drag the macro into the sheet. In paste special we can associate the cables, locations, symbols etc from copied circuit to the existing components, cables, location etc in our project.

Figure 17 – Paste special options

As we go ahead and press next we can associate the existing component, cables or location in the copied items to the existing project. We have associated cable W9 in our macro to the existing cable W1 in our project. See figure 18 & 19.