Although you could use standard AutoCAD tools to add the attributes needed, the tools in the Symbol Builder make the task much easier - and faster. AutoCAD Electrical's Symbol Builder includes tools to help you turn ordinary AutoCAD blocks into intelligent electrical blocks. This is where the Symbol Builder, formerly called the Black Box Builder, comes in. But what about components that aren't part of the extensive library? You could insert plain AutoCAD blocks into your drawings, but then you would lose AutoCAD Electrical's parametric abilities - the ability to tie components together and to automatically generate reports based on information stored in the application's intelligent blocks. There are hundreds of these smart blocks, or symbols, included with AutoCAD Electrical.

In AutoCAD Electrical, the symbols that you place into your schematics are basically AutoCAD blocks that have been made 'intelligent' with added attributes. Also, if you already had a given Block in the current drawing, but the one in the source drawing has been changed, you can update the definition of it in the current drawing from the Design Center.Creating AutoCAD Electrical Blocks (Avatech Tricks Tutorial) 31 Dec, 2006 By: Greg Shaffer Use Symbol Builder to convert standard blocks. This has one nice advantage over INSERT's dialog box - as with the ribbon thumbnails, it shows you thumbnail images of all Blocks in the drawing at once, rather than only one at a time when you pick on a Block name. You can also have Blocks defined collectively in some common-source drawing file(s), and use the AutoCAD Design Center to get at them from within any drawing. button to navigate to wherever you put them.

Otherwise you will need to use the Browse. If they are in a folder that is in the OPTIONS/ Files tab/ Support File Search Path list, you can type in a name and it will find it. You can put Block definitions into individual external drawing files using WBLOCK, but they will not as a result then appear in the list in the INSERT dialog box or the ribbon thumbnails.

Whether or not they also exist anywhere else, or whether they came from an external drawing file or were created within the current drawing, is not something the current drawing knows anything about. The ones that appear in the list in the INSERT dialog box, or the ribbon images, are only those definitions stored in the current drawing.

Autocad block library electrical