NI Circuit Design Community Blog

Make Your Circuit Files Look More Professional

Hello again!

This week I’m going to share a tip for making your circuit files look a little more professional. Use Title Blocks on each of your designs, and you can have a fully customizable and standardized label for all of the circuits you design. You can see an example of a Title Block in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Sample Title Block

Title Blocks are easy to customize. From the toolbar, go to Place>>Title Block. You will be directed to the titleblocks folder, where several template designs are provided. For my design, I chose default.tb7. The Title Block is ghosted to your mouse, so click anywhere on the screen to place it.

Now you can fill in the various fields to describe your design. Some of these fields, like “Title”, will be filled in automatically based on the file name. Double-click the Title Block to open the Title Block window as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Title Block window

Once you have filled in the fields, click OK and you are taken back to the circuit. Right-click the Title Block and click Move to>>Bottom Left to align it to the bottom left side of the screen. My completed design is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Complete design with Title Block

You may not work at National Instruments, so it makes sense that you would change the graphic shown in the top right hand corner of the Title Block. Right-click the Title Block and select Edit Symbol/Title Block. This will open up the Title Block Editor. You can delete the National Instruments logo and place your own. In the toolbar of the Title Block Editor, go to Graphics>>Bitmap… and navigate to a saved image that you want to use. Make any changes, and save the title block file in a folder (you will remember!) so you can use it again for other circuit files.

As an example, my finished Title Block is shown in Figure 4.