Found a way of working with Easy PC groups to speed up component placement in large designs. It has saved me hours and works a treat.
Proceed as follows
In schematic, select all components in a functional blocks and add them to a named group. Set this to NOT be schematic only and it doesnt need to be a tight group. Make name descriptive of function etc. Repeat until all blocks are grouped.
Transfer to PCB. Dump all the parts from bin in a pile at the bottom of the PCB working area. Draw a board outline - make it big enough to accomodate the biggest group.
Open Goto Dockable bar. Select groups from the form. All your functional groups will be listed.
Pick one and double click it. All items in that group will now be selected from among the pile of parts on the PCB.
With the group selected, goto autoplace parts and get it to autoplace selected parts. It will now put all the parts from the selected group in the board outline box.
Leave them selected in the box and move them all out of the box and place them somewhere convenient.
Repeat for all groups.
Each functional block of parts is now grouped in different places in the working area ready for proper placement.
It saves a lot of effort on large designs by breaking the long list of parts into functional groups.
If you create a project and have each of your "blocks" as a seperate schematic, you can do the same thing simply be selecting the components in each schematic and drgging them onto the design.
If your functional blocks are on separate sheets as Iain describes, there is an option on the Autoplace dialog to place all the components from a given sheet, thus avoiding the need to select the components at all.
Tip: Using 
Posted - 03 Aug 2010 : 00:11:13
