Here's how it works:ġ) Select the objects you want. There's a million reasons this is necessary and the best way I've found to do this in Altium is using the little-known Inspector panel. You want to select a bunch of vias and change their size or you want to change a bunch of component orientation en masse. Global editing is sometimes critically important. Break Wire makes schemagical technolomaniac.See my other tip about this command, it's tres useful. Try it! If the orientation isn't what you want, select the strings for the designators and use F11 (Inspector) shortcut to change the orientation of the text. You can move it later to make it all pretty and such, but this is a nice way to get things clear when you're placing parts. That'll ensure you know what text goes with what component.
(Do this if you wish, but I'll ship things twice as fast as you :)įor placement, you can also use the command, Position Component Text from that same menu and center all of the component text above the parts. This'll get them into position without having to count grid points. Under Align you'll have commands like Align Top, Align Bottom, etc. Now, when they all look selected, like the row of messy comps seen below, go ahead and right click on any one of them and you'll find Align in the right mouse menu. I don't care how you do it, but the easiest way is to use Shift + select to select multiple components.
If you have a net label in schematic and you've name it Foo as seen in the example, and then you want to create a port with the same name.you can either edit the port and type "Foo" like the noobs do, or you can hold the port over the net label, hit "Insert" and the name of the coincident net label will be transferred to the port without you having to (mis)type it. 'Insert' key copies properties from coincident objects technolomaniac.It'll increment the designator for you (you'll be on the hook to make sure you don't end up with duplicate designators).Ĭan't emphasize this enough.This is a massive time saver! Then follow it up with the mighty Shift + Drag to duplicate it. Instead, find and existing one and click it. So take a case where you would otherwise have to go back to the Libraries panel and find that totally common 0.1uF 0603 cap you're already using in 5 different places in schematic. Voila, two more, perfect 100 unit long wires.
Select the first two (draw a bounding box or use Shift + Select to multi-select the wires) and hold Shift and Drag. Now you decide that you really wanted 4 wires. You're proud of yourself because this is exactly what you wanted and you did it! Woohoo! If you want another, simply hold Shift and drag on top of the wire and it'll duplicate it. So you have placed a wire in schematic that is exactly 100 units wide.