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Altium designer: Creating a SCH and PCB sheet with custom title

Altium designer:  Creating a SCH and PCB sheet with custom title

For the engineer who are new to the Designer world a small tutorial describing how to create your on sheet title matching company templates. This tutorial is also useful for the users of P-CAD, you just have to change the file extension from sch/pcb to tbk and ttb. To begin with some word on where you can find Designers templates which are stored in \Altium Designer\System\Templates folder. There are some templates already done for various sheet dimensions (from A0 to A4 end others). When finished with this tutorial I suggest that you save your files inside the folder mentioned before.

  1. Firstly open a new empty schematic document File » New » Schematic. If you have your Designer set to Defaults you will have as a title a default Altium sheet with the black logo.
  2. With the left mouse button select from the menu Options » Sheet or chose from the main menu Design » Options » Sheet Options Tab.
  3. From the list you can select the default templates, user can select also a size with the drop down menu Standard Styles.
  4. Next step is important you MUST un-check the Title Block option which remove standard title block.
  5. When done with settings press OK button and start drawing your title.
  6. From the main menu or with the right mouse button select Place » Drawing tools » Line – line tool
  7. Now you can start drawing title.
  8. After done with drawing use Place » Text String from the main menu to add parameters, that you can during crating SCH or PCB change.
  9. Another thing you can add is pictures / logos, this is done selecting Place » Drawing Tools » Graphic from the main menu. When the cursor appears you will need to click once to define the top left of the image location, then a second time to define the bottom right of the image location.

You are now ready to save this sheet as a template:

  1. Choose File » Save As from the menus.
  2. Type a name for the template in the File Name field, and set the Save As Type option to Schematic template binary (*.Schdot).
  3. The extension .SchDOT defines this file as a sheet template. This template can now be used for new or existing designs. Close the template file when you have finished.

Note that SchDot files cannot be edited from the Schematic Editor. You must first change the template file name extension to SchDOC. After editing it can then again be saved with the protected extension SchDOT

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