Altium

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Smart Paste

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Smart Paste takes the familiar copy-and-paste concept to an entirely new level by transforming the objects you are copying into the type that matches those in the target paste area. The system has been created to provide major productivity enhancements in schematic editing. This ‘on-the-fly’ translation is particularly useful within Altium Designer’s unified environment because it streamlines design capture for both PCB and FPGA design projects.

During schematic capture there are a large number of objects that need to be placed and connected as you build up the connectivity of your design. It’s fairly common during this process to already have information on the schematic that relates to different types of design objects. For example, a bus in one part of the schematic might appear as individual nets in another. Or ports on one sheet might appear as sheet entries on a sheet symbol. Wouldn’t it be a real time saver if you could simply copy one type of object and paste it as another? With Altium Designer you can.

Using Smart Paste you can actually transform the copy of the selected objects into other objects as you paste them. For example, selected Net Labels can become Ports when pasted, or selected Sheet Entries can become Ports+Wires+Net Labels, all in a single paste action.

You also have complete control over which of the objects in the selection set you want to paste – no more carefully avoiding those wires as you select the Ports, simply clear the checkbox to ignore wires when you Smart Paste your selection. Sophisticated data transformations can also be performed such as pasting a bus net-label as the equivalent series of individual wire labels, or the reverse case of a series of matching wire labels as a single bus label.

Another handy feature is the ability to paste the selected circuitry as a graphic. Using this you can easily include a graphic of a section of a circuit on another sheet, and size it as required.

To access the Smart Paste feature simply select Edit » Smart Paste to transform the clipboard objects as you paste them.

If you haven’t experimented with Altium Designer’s Smart Paste feature yet, take some time to become acquainted. Once you do, you’ll save time tenfold during every design capture.