Electronics Design Manager panel

The Design Manager makes it easy to navigate through all the components, signals, groups, and PCB sketches in the document. It is especially useful when working with densely crowded designs, where it is difficult to see and examine components. The Design Manager is useful for selecting objects by project sheet and component type, for extracting information or routing.

The Design Manager panel is available when you are working on:

• schematics
• circuit boards

In the View field of the Browser tab, you can choose to display Components, Signals, or Groups.

Select a component, and the Items table shows attributes of sub-elements (Signal, Pad dimensions, Center Position, Trace length, etc.). In the Components list, you can lock a component's position. Select one signal to Ripup, QuickRoute, or Fanout all elements of it. If a Group of elements is created, the entire group can be moved by selecting the group title.

The Filter tab is used for building queries to select object types by name, such as C* for a capacitor of any number. An example of efficient use of this feature is to select all capacitors of a certain value, and then with a few clicks on the Inspector panel, replace them all with a different model of capacitor.

Two useful buttons for object selection appear in the upper right of the Design Manager:

Select on board highlights the object or objects selected in the Results field, and draws a frame around them.

Zoom to selection zooms the view in for a close view of the object or objects selected in the Results field.