Getting Familiar with the Altium Design Environment

Altium Designer brings a complete electronic product development environment, catering for all aspects of the electronic development process, including front-end design and capture, mixed-signal circuit simulation, physical PCB design, etc.

This page discusses basic working techniques with Altium Designer so you can quickly start your next product design.

Main UI Elements

Altium Designer uses UI elements common to other Windows applications and CAD tools. The main of those are shown below and described afterward.

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Design space – the main region of the application window where the active document is shown. In the design space, you can explore the document's content (e.g., a schematic document, as shown in the above image) and work with it. Panels – provide access to different features and functionalities related to the active project or document. Panels can be accessed from the menu of the Panels button at the bottom right of the design space. Main menus – provide you with access to commands for working with the current document type. The set of available menus and commands depends on the type of the currently active document. Active Bar – always shown at the top of the design space of the current document, the Active Bar provides handy access to the most commonly used commands, such as commands for placing and selecting objects. Quick Access Bar – provides you with access to high-level operations, such as saving documents and undoing/redoing actions.

Learn more about these and other elements of the Altium Designer environment: Elements of the Environment.

Signing in to Your Altium Account

Learn more about available signing-in options: Signing in to Your Altium Account.

Connecting to Your Altium 365 Workspace

When signed in to your Altium account, you can connect to an available Altium 365 Workspace to access its features and data. To do so, click on the Active Workspace Control at the top-right of the design space (when you are not connected to a Workspace, the control is presented as ). In the subsequent menu, click the entry for the Altium 365 Workspace you wish to connect to. The control will change to reflect the name of the connected Workspace (e.g., ).

Learn more about available connection options: Accessing Your Workspace.

Setting Up the Environment

The Preferences dialog is a central location where you can set up global system settings across different functional areas of Altium Designer. To access the Preferences dialog, click the  icon at the top-right of the design space.

Click a page entry on the left-hand side of the dialog to show its options on the right-hand side of the dialog. For convenience, pages are clustered into categories for function areas (System, Data Management, Schematic, etc.).

Learn more about Altium Designer preferences: Accessing, Defining & Managing System Preferences.

Working with Design Projects and Documents

The starting point for every design created in Altium Designer is a project. An Altium Designer project is a set of design documents whose output defines a specific implementation. As well as storing links to each document in the project, the project file also stores project-specific options, such as error check settings.

Altium Designer supports the PCB, Multi-board and Harness types of design projects. Below is a brief description of each.

The most of project management operations (creating, opening, etc.) are performed using the File main menu and the Projects panel.

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To create a new design project, select the File » New » Project command from the main menus. In the Create Project dialog that opens, select the location where you want to create the project, the type of the project, and other options such as project name, storage folder, etc. After clicking the Create button, the entry of the new project will appear in the Projects panel. All project-related data is stored in documents, which are also referred to as files. To add a new document to a project, right-click the project's entry in the Projects panel and select a required document type in the Add New to Project menu. Note that a newly created document is initially unsaved. Use the right-click menu of the document's entry in the Projects panel to save it. Similarly, use right-click menu of the project's entry in the Projects panel to save it when the project is changed (e.g., when its structure is changed by adding a new document). To open an existing project, use the File » Open Project command from the main menus and the subsequent Open Project dialog. The structure of the opened project will appear in the Projects panel. Double-click a document entry in the panel to open this document in the design space.

When working with a document of a "graphical" type (e.g., a schematic sheet or PCB document), you can zoom and pan the document to focus on a specific document area. The basic shortcuts that can be used to do this are:

• Ctrl+Mouse Wheel or Middle-Click, Hold&Drag to zoom in and out

• Right-Click, Hold&Drag or Mouse Wheel or Shift+Mouse Wheel to slide the document around

The video below demonstrates use of these shortcuts.

Working with Design Objects

Creation of a document, be it a schematic sheet, PCB, or drawing, is essentially placing objects in the required arrangement and setting their properties. The main placement and editing techniques common for most Altium Designer editors are listed below.

1. To place an object, select the corresponding placement command from the main menus or the Active Bar. For example, to place a wire in a schematic sheet, select the Place » Wire command from the main menus or click the  icon in the Active Bar.

2. After selecting a placement command, you will enter the placement mode indicated by a crosshair under the cursor. Position the cursor in the design space, then left-click to place the object. For complex objects, such as wires or polygons, you must continue the position-and-click procedure to place all vertices of the object.

3. When in placement mode, press Tab to open to edit the object's properties in the Properties panel that opens, before placing the object. Once you have finished setting the properties, click the  button in the design space to return to placement mode. 

4. To end placement mode, right-click.

5. To edit the properties of a placed object, select it by clicking on it in the design space. Its properties will be shown in the Properties panel. If the panel is not open, double-click the object to select it and open the panel.

The video below demonstrates the object placement process and editing its properties.

Examples

We all can appreciate using examples to get us going with specific aspects of software. At times, such examples showcase a feature or set of features that make the learning curve a little less steep. In a similar fashion, we like to have access to a pre-developed set of libraries, giving us a boost in the choice of components we can use 'out-of-the-box'.

A selection of example designs is installed as part of the initial installation. In a standard default installation of the software, these can be found in the \Users\Public\Documents\Altium\AD<version>\Examples folder of the installation. Some sample projects, components, and other design content are available when connecting to a Workspace (if you opted to include the sample data during activation/installation of the Workspace). Also, components equipped with domain models (symbol, footprint, simulation model) can be found using the Manufacturer Part Search panel.