What's New in AutoCAD Electrical 2016

Location View Tab on Project Manager

The new Location View tab on Project Manager provides a complete view of the devices and wiring contained in the active project. Components are organized by installation and location values.

Use the Location View tab to:

AutoCAD Electrical and Inventor Interoperability

You can now link an AutoCAD Electrical project to an Inventor project. Find

The link provides data exchange between your 2D and 3D electrical designs. Once your project is linked, use the Location View tab to view both the AutoCAD Electrical and Inventor components and data.

Once the projects are linked you can:

This same functionality is available in Inventor from the new Electromechanical tab on the Assembly ribbon.

Note: This was an idea from the AutoCAD Electrical IdeaStation.

Default Wire Sequence

The drawing and project property for sort order now applies to wire sequence as well as tag and wire number order. This setting provides default wire sequencing for wire networks with multiple components.

AutoCAD Electrical performs the following steps when determining wire connection sequence:

  1. Check for a wire sequence defined using the Edit Wire Sequence command, including any Direct-to-Terminal connections.
  2. Check for angled tees on the wire network.
  3. Check if any of the components have the same Location.
  4. Use the Sort order drawing property to determine the connections for anything not accounted for in the previous checks.

Wire Number Attribute Support

Edit the wire number attributes, W01USER-W10USER, on the Edit Wire Number/Attributes dialog box. These values are now available fields in the following reports:

Insert Connector

The Insert Connector dialog box settings are maintained across sessions of AutoCAD Electrical. Once you set your default settings, you do not have to set them again. The product supports two groups of settings, one for metric drawings and another for imperial drawings. The appropriate settings are used automatically based on the active drawing.

Annotate One-Line Components

When working on a one-line diagram you may want to annotate a one-line component based on a schematic or panel component already inserted. To make it easier, a new option is available to filter the list of components based on whether there is already a matching one-line symbol.

Select this check box to include all schematic, panel, and one-line references where there is a matching one-line component for either a schematic component or a panel footprint.

Note: The one-line reference is only included if the Show one-line components box is also checked.

Clear this check box to filter out all schematic, panel, and one-line references where there is a matching one-line component for either a schematic component or a panel footprint. The resulting list contains only tags that do not have matching one-line components.

Note: This was an idea from the AutoCAD Electrical IdeaStation.

Schematic Terminals

If you insert schematic terminals using the Multiple Insert commands, there are now options to hide the tagstrip, installation, and location attribute values.

When using Multiple Insert (Icon Menu) the options are available after the first terminal is inserted. When using Multiple Insert (Pick Master), the options are available for each terminal inserted, including the first one.

Note: This was an idea from the AutoCAD Electrical IdeaStation.

Miscellaneous Enhancements