Explore how to finalize an electrical drawing set and export it to PDF efficiently and accurately. Learn the key steps from checking your sheet views to setting the appropriate export parameters, ensuring a high-quality, well-structured final output.
Key Insights
- The process begins by reviewing the selected sheets, ensuring everything is in order. The sheets can also be edited to adjust the print order and confirm its accuracy before sending the set to print.
- When exporting to PDF, several settings need to be adjusted, such as setting the zoom to 100 to maintain the scale, selecting high raster quality, and choosing colors as color for vector processing. Unnecessary options, such as blue links, can be left unchecked.
- The final electrical drawing set is saved in a suitable location on the computer, with a specific name for easy identification. For instance, it can be saved in a dedicated folder such as VDCI, maintaining an organized workflow.
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Now it's time to output our final electrical drawing set to PDF. Let's go ahead and open up our cover sheet, E001, and we just want to have a good look at that on our screen. Everything looks really good.
Now we can go up to the File menu, and we want to select Export and then PDF. And we'll go through these options. Number one, we have Selected Views Sheets, and right now it might say In Session, so we'll click the Edit button.
And we might not have very much checked. For example, we might see just one sheet, this cover sheet checked. And what we can do is uncheck the Unchecked Views.
That will show us everything because it kind of hides anything not checked. We want to open that up so we can see absolutely everything. Then we can filter this display.
We can uncheck all of the boxes except for our sheets. We want to turn on All Sheets. And with All Sheets selected, we can see all of our sheets, and we can simply check the Check All button.
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Now all of our sheets are selected. Now the cool thing about this window is we can also edit the print order. We'll click on that, just make sure everything is in order.
And it's 01,010,110,120,130,140,410,430,600,610, E700 in numerical order. So it looked really good. If something was not in order, it's really easy to drag it around until it is in the correct order.
And always a good practice to check this before sending it off to print that we have the correct order. So let's go ahead and say Select. Again, confirming that we have all 11 sheets.
Now we want to give it a name. So it's BIM323. And it'll be our first name, last name.
And we're going to call this one Final. It's our final project. We can save this to any location on our computer we wish.
So browse to the location that makes sense for you. For me, I'm going to save it to the VDCI folder that I have created. The size, the page size, it can pull from the sheet size.
That's super convenient. We are using the 30 × 42 sheet. We're set there.
Paper placement is center. Zoom is 100. Super critical.
Fit to page will make everything not scaled. We want to make sure Zoom is set to 100. And then the other settings should be okay.
We'll quickly take a look here. We want high raster quality. Colors as color.
Vector processing. We want most of these options checked. But we don't need blue links.
Unless you'd like to, you can. If it's color print, you can check that one if you'd like. And that's about pretty much all we need.
We don't need to export in background. We'll just wait for it to process. If our screen looks about like this, we know we have all the sheets checked here, we can click the export button.
I've already created one, so it's going to remind me to replace. But yours probably won't, if it's your first time sending this to PDFs. I'm going to say yes.
And it will process for a moment. Shouldn't take too long. It's going to create that PDF in the background.
And once this hourglass goes away, I'll know that the processing has finally completed. So there it is. It's all done.
And once it's done, we can find it in our directory and just take a look at this PDF. Number one, we want to make sure that it has all 11 sheets. And then number two, we'll just click through each one, make sure everything looks good.
And wow, our set does look really cool. We have a cover sheet with so much great information. We have our analysis, our electrical analysis, with each of our area-based loads.
We have our power plans with all of those receptacles. And we have our lighting plans with all of the lights placed. And we have our callouts for our enlarged lighting plans.
Then we have all of those details around our electrical room. Then we have our enlarged lights with our light detail. We've got our equipment and lighting fixture schedule, all four of our panel boards, and our one-line diagram and switchboard schedule with its nameplate detail.
Awesome work for completing this project. It's a lot to be proud of. Thanks for being here.
