What's New in AutoCAD Electrical 2014

By Miles Nicholson

Autodesk 360 and AutoCAD Electrical (Store your projects in Autodesk 360 and access it from anywhere. Autodesk 360 offers secure access to design files so you can store, edit work, and share work confidently)

• Control access to your files
• Share files as view only, view and download, or full access
• View and add comments
• Edit drawings online in AutoCAD WS

Design Feed and AutoCAD Electrical (Design Feed provides a way of entering collaborative posts about a drawing in both real-time and asynchronous modes. Posts appear with the related drawings on the desktop, on the web, and across mobile devices)

• When you create a post, you use the Design Feed palette to enter a text message and/or attach an image that conveys what you want to express about the drawing to which the post is attached. You can link the original post to a point, area, or object in the drawing. You can also tag colleagues and clients to notify them of your post. Notifications are sent to them through email and within AutoCAD Electrical.
• Once you have committed a post, it is uploaded to your Autodesk 360 account with the drawing, along with any images you've attached. From there, colleagues and clients can access it and post their replies. Replies are listed as "children" below the original "parent" post. If there are no replies, the original post can stand by itself.
• When the questions in a post and its replies are no longer active, you can resolve the thread to hide it from the Design Feed.

Metric Panel Libraries

• Panel footprint symbols are now available in metric. The inch and metric panel libraries are both installed during installation. To use the metric version, set the Project Properties Project Settings  Panel Footprint Libraries path to:
• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Autodesk\Acade {version}\Libs\panel_mm
• Windows 7, 8: C:\Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk\Acade {version}\Libs\panel_mm

Language Support (The language database is used by the Language Conversion tool which converts description and switch position component text)

• The language database, wd_lang1.mdb, now includes the following languages:
• Danish
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Finnish

Autodesk Inventor Integration

• The Export to Inventor tool is updated as follows:
• Include all components
• Parent and child components treated as one device
• New option to export terminals as terminal strips
• Start-up Experience

The new Welcome Screen provides links to: (Select Help drop-down  Learning Tools  Welcome Screen to relaunch the Welcome Screen after start up)

• Create or open a drawing
• Open recently used drawings
• View the Essentials Videos
• Autodesk Exchange Apps store
• Autodesk 360

Help Updates

• Five new videos were added to the Essentials Videos series. The Essentials Videos were moved from the Help to the Welcome Screen.