AutoCAD Electrical 2021 – Associating a ZIP Program For Project Compression

by Miles Nicholson

This month’s Tips and Tricks focuses on how you can associate a ZIP program to the software so that you can ZIP up your projects into a smaller compressed file format, possibly for emailing or transfer to clients / internal staff. The utility even allows multiple ZIP programs to be associated so that you have a choice of when compressing your projects.

For 7-Zip specifically, please refer to the following article:

Using 7-Zip to Publish Your Project

For other zip programs, right click over the current activated project.

Select Publish and you then have the option of publishing a project to ZIP (compressed file format):

The ZIP file program that you wish to use has to be associated with AutoCAD® Electrical. The software will not operate with Windows compressed file option as there is no program association with that functionality.

To set an association with a ZIP program, right click over the current activated project and select 

Select 

Select 

Highlight the file WD.ENV and then right click and Open to open the file up. The file can be edited using Notepad.

The variable for associating a ZIP program is the following:

*WD_ZIP,c:/program files/WinRAR/rar.exe, full path/name for alternate zipping utility.

You can have multiple ZIP programs associated such as WinZip, WinRar, 7-zip etc.

For each ZIP program, just repeat the line underneath one another and remove the rem character of “*”.

Therefore an association with WinRAR would be:

WD_ZIP,c:/program files/WinRAR/rar.exe, full path/name for alternate zipping utility.

N.B. The above is a screenshot of Windows Explorer showing the path.

Make sure you Save your changes and the next time AutoCAD® Electrical is restarted, the ZIP option will be available.