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In addition to CADMATIC Electrical, the installation package contains the base program CADMATIC Draw. Draw is used for basic CAD design, while Electrical adds functions intended solely for electrical design.

After installing CADMATIC Draw and CADMATIC Electrical and activating your license, you are ready to start using Electrical!

Learn more:

First startup

You can start the program, for example, by double-clicking the Draw icon on the desktop. If the license information has not been given yet, it will be requested at first startup. When the program opens, select the Electrical application from the drop-down menu on the top right or on the Start page:

Most of the functions and tools are provided in the ribbon located to the top of the application window. The ribbon consists of tabs for all the main functions, and the tabs, in turn, consist of logical groups for the various functions and tools.

The active tab is underlined. When you open a drawing, the correct tab (Single-line, Layout, Schematics, or Cabinet Layout) opens automatically based on the drawing type set for the drawing. Within that tab, you have most of the functions you need for handling that type of drawings.

On the Electrical tab, you have access to general functions such as starting new drawings and defining settings. With Ctrl + D, you can easily move between the Electrical tab and the tab related to the active drawing (Schematics, for example).

The Home, Annotate and Tools tabs include CADMATIC Draw's basic CAD functions, such as drawing polylines and shapes and inserting texts.

Explore and test with example project drawings

Installation includes example drawings and an example project with different kinds of documents. By default, the project is in the Samples folder. Copy the path to Windows Explorer to find the location easily:

C:\ProgramData\CADMATIC\Draw 25 English\Samples\Electrical\Electrical Example Project

 

You can copy the project folder to the desktop, for example, to keep the original intact and to modify the copy.

Explore the example project documents freely, make some edits and try to use some of the Electrical functions. Check out these documents, for example, to view certain drawing types created with Electrical:

 

Drawing type:

  1. Arrangement drawing

  2. Load list

  3. Generated report

  4. Multi-line diagram

  5. Key single-line diagram

  6. Cable connection diagram

Create a new drawing

On the Start Page, click Create new to start a new drawing. Alternatively, click New on the Electrical tab.

The Start a new Electrical drawing dialog opens. Select a suitable folder for file location, give the drawing a name and select to add the document to the project if you want to create a database for the project. Additionally, make sure that the drawing type is correct.

After this, you can select Electrical tab > Projects group > Settings to edit the target information or the settings in the Project information/settings dialog.

The basic setup is now done, and you can start designing. For more help to get started, check out our videos at myCADMATIC.