AutoCAD Electrical 2020 – Create Wire Colour/Gauge Information From Your Existing Wire Types

By Miles Nicholson

The following article explains how you can utilise Wire Colour / Gauge Labels. Wire colour / gauge label information is held within a text file with an extension of *.WDW. The format of the file is “<layer name>””;””<wire colour /size>”. The wire colour/ size can be any order.

 To add all of the different wire size /  colour combinations may take some time especially if you have a lot of wire size/colour options. Ideally, your company standard wire types should already be defined in the template drawing (*.DWT) and this can be reused to create the *.WDW file.

Note:     A Layer Name shouldn’t ideally have a space in the wire layer name nor any control characters such as:

“<” “>” “?” “|” “\” “/” “,” “.” “’” “=”

To copy all of the wire types, select the command  Create/Edit Wire Type

Highlight the first Layer Name row and the last Layer Name row whilst holding Shift down to select all wire layers. Right click > Copy

Open a blank workbook in Excel.

In the first cell, right click > Paste

In the above example, the required colour and gauge labels are similar to the Layer Name value.

Copy column A and paste to create a duplicated column B.

Highlight column B and use Replace to remove the “_” character and replace with a “ “. If you wish to have the colour and size split across 2 lines, use the “|” character instead.

Save the file as a CSV (UTF-8) format file (this is required if you have used the “²” character).

Open the resultant CSV using Notepad.

Use Find & Replace to replace the “,” with “;”

Select File > Save As >

The file must be saved with the extension of *.wdw. It must be located within one of your Support directories or project directory.

If you do use the “²” character, you should use a font style that supports Unicode characters e.g. Arial for it to be displayed correctly within your drawings.