Manual
Designing a panel,
start to finish
PanelPro Studio lays out a control panel at true size in the browser, then gives you back the things a workshop actually needs: a wiring schedule, a bill of materials, drawings, and a 3D model with every part named. This is the whole tool, in the order you would use it.
Last updated for the July 2026 release, which added wiring, the cable schedule, and shareable links for the floor.
Starting a project
Open the app and you get three ways in: a new project, one from the cloud,
or a local .panelpro file. Nothing is created until you choose,
so you never land in a document you did not ask for.
A cloud project saves to your organisation and is what you need for sharing and for working alongside anyone else. A local file is a single document on your machine — fine on your own, but it cannot be shared to the floor and nobody else can open it.
Tabs
Several projects can be open at once, each in its own tab. Switching tabs does not reload anything, so comparing two panels is just clicking between them.
The enclosure and the backplate
A project holds one or more enclosures. Each enclosure holds one or more backplates. Gear mounts on a backplate; glands go on the enclosure faces. The tree on the left is that hierarchy, and it is where you add, rename and select each part of it.
Setting the sizes
With nothing selected, the right-hand panel shows the panel properties: backplate width and height, enclosure width, height and depth, colour, and whether the enclosure is shown at all. Everything is in millimetres and everything is real — the 3D view and the drawings both measure from these.
What goes on the bill of materials
The enclosure dialog has a purchasing details section — manufacturer, part number, description, IP rating, material and supplier. Fill it in and the BOM lists the enclosure as something a supplier can quote against. Leave it blank and it is listed by its size.
Using a real enclosure model
Enclosure model (STEP…) imports the manufacturer's own model, so the panel sits inside the actual box rather than a generic one. The model is uploaded with the project, so anyone who opens it sees the same thing.
Laying out rail, duct and gear
The 2D view is the layout view. The left panel carries cable duct in the usual widths, DIN rail, and your component library. Click a size to pick it up, then click the backplate to place it.
Everything snaps to the rail
Components snap onto DIN rail and sit at their real width, so a row of breakers occupies exactly the space it will occupy in the panel. If it does not fit, you can see that here rather than on the bench.
Parts look like the parts
A placed component is drawn as a straight-down render of its actual model — real outline, holes, and the colours it has been painted. Terminal designations sit in a band above the row rather than on the body, so an 87-way terminal strip is still readable.
Moving, copying and deleting
Drag to move. Ctrl+click adds to a selection, and dragging any selected item moves the group. Right-click gives copy, paste, duplicate, rotate and delete. On a touchscreen, one finger pans and two fingers pinch to zoom.
The parts library
A component is a real part: a name, a manufacturer, a part number, its mounting dimensions, and a STEP model. Import the manufacturer's STEP file and the setup wizard walks through orienting it, setting its width and height on the rail, and telling it which way it faces.
One library for everyone
Library parts belong to your organisation, so a part someone sets up once is set up for everybody. Public catalogue parts can be imported into your own library and edited from there.
Painting a part
The material editor colours individual faces of a model — the front of a breaker, the lever on a terminal — so a render looks like the panel rather than a grey assembly. Colours are stored on the library part, so every place it is used gets them.
Connection points
Right-click a library part and choose Connections… to say where its terminals are. Click on the 3D model to place a point, or type its coordinates. Each point gets a label (the terminal number), which face the conductor leaves by — the side or the front — and whether it runs to the duct above or below. This is what makes wiring possible, and it is done once per part, not once per panel.
Wiring the panel
Turn on Wiring above the 2D view. Connection points appear on every placed part. Click one, then click another, and a conductor is routed between them.
How a wire routes itself
A wire is not drawn straight from A to B. It leaves its terminal along the face you defined, clears the body of the part, drops into the duct that serves it, travels inside the duct network — turning corners where ducts meet — and comes up at the other end. It never crosses open backplate, because a real conductor does not.
Corners are rounded to the conductor's own minimum bend radius, so a 6 mm² visibly cannot be bent as tightly as a 0.5 mm². The 2D plan and the 3D model are drawn from the same route, so they cannot disagree.
Wire types and colours
Wires are chosen from stock sizes, 0.5 mm² up to 240 mm², with a matching range of earth sizes. Colour is picked from the colours wire is actually sold in, including green/yellow — not from a colour mixer, because a shade between two drum colours is not something you can buy.
Wire numbers and designations
Every conductor gets a W number — W1, W2 — which is unique and permanent, and is how the schedule refers to it. Separately it gets a designation: the net it belongs to, such as 24BAT1, which several conductors can share.
The designation is what prints on the marking sleeve, at both ends of the conductor, because that is the point of marking it — so you can find the far end. A wire with no designation carries no sleeve, exactly as an unmarked conductor does not.
Keeping circuits apart
Select a duct and its properties list what it carries: LV power, ELV, comms, earth, or any category you define. Untick one and wires of that category cannot route through that duct — they take another path, and their cut length is calculated from the path they actually take. Leave everything ticked and the duct carries anything, which is how every duct starts.
This is how you enforce your own build practice — signals and high current down one side, comms down the other — rather than relying on remembering.
Duct lids
A duct can be given a snap-on lid, which appears in the 3D model and the renders. It is off by default, because a lidded duct hides the wiring you opened the model to look at.
The cable schedule and terminations
The wiring schedule is the document the panel gets built from. Every
conductor, one row: its number, its designation, where each end lands in
IEC designation form (-CB4:2 → -X6:1), the wire type, the
colour, what goes on each end, and the length to cut.
Cut length
Cut length is the routed length — through the ducts, including the depth it changes as it drops in and out — plus the slack allowance, counted once for the whole conductor. Slack defaults to 100 mm per wire and can be set per project or overridden per wire.
A wire that cannot route gets no length at all, and says why. A straight-line guess would look exactly like a real number, and somebody would cut to it.
How each end is terminated
Every wire end carries its own connector: ferrule, ring lug, fork lug, spade, pin, bare, or something you describe. Set them in the Wires dialog — there is a control at each end, because the two ends are usually different. A wire from a DIN terminal to the earth bar is a ferrule at one end and an M8 lug at the other, and that is the normal case rather than the exception.
Where the size alone will not order the part, a second box takes the detail: the stud size on a lug, the tab width on a spade.
The crimp list
Rolled up by what each end actually is, counted per end. Ferrules and lugs are different boxes and are ordered separately; bare ends are not ordered at all. The schedule prints both terminations as their own columns, so nobody has to assume.
Bill of materials
File → Bill of Materials. Components are grouped by part with their reference designators collapsed into ranges (X1–X3, X5), and duct and DIN rail are rolled up by type with total length. It is generated from the layout every time you open it, so it cannot drift from the panel.
Copy it to the clipboard or download it as CSV for your purchasing system.
Drawings
The Drawing tab builds sheets from the panel: 2D plan views, 3D isometrics, and front views, at a stated scale, in a titled and bordered frame. Add dimensions and leaders where the workshop needs them.
Seeing the real parts under the symbols
A 2D plan view lays a straight-down render of each real part underneath its symbol at 40% opacity. A symbol tells you a device is there; the render tells you which way up it goes and where its terminals are, which is what somebody building from the sheet actually needs.
Select the view and a properties panel appears beside it with an on/off toggle and an opacity slider. Turn it off for a plain vector drawing. The setting is saved with the view, so two sheets in the same set can differ.
Terminal numbering on the sheet
Terminal numbers read up the strip and are sized from each terminal's own pitch, so numbers on a 5mm terminal and numbers on a 2.5mm terminal both fit between their own two edges and cannot run into their neighbours. Where the view is zoomed too far out for the type to be legible it is left off rather than smeared, and it comes back as you zoom in or when the sheet prints at its real scale.
Balloons and the parts list
Pick the balloon tool and click a part. It drops a circled number on a leader pointing at that part, and the number is the item's line on the bill of materials — so a fitter reading "8" on the sheet turns to item 8 on the list. Balloons drag by the circle; the dot stays on the part.
Item numbers come from the BOM's own order and are contiguous. Adding a part renumbers the ones after it, which is what happens to any real parts list, and is why a drawing is re-issued at a revision rather than patched.
Naming each sheet
The title block carries the project title and a name for the sheet you are on — GENERAL ARRANGEMENT, TERMINALS LAYOUT, BILL OF MATERIAL. Click the sheet name line in the block to set it. A set whose every sheet claims the same name is hard to file and harder to talk about on the phone.
Revisions
Details holds a revision history: Rev, description, date. It prints as a table sitting on top of the title block, newest first, with the last four shown. Leave it empty on a first issue and nothing is drawn.
Nameplates and tag plates
Also in Details: compliance nameplates, tag plates and warning labels, each with its text, material, finish and fixing — stainless laser engraved on drive pins, blue-and-white laminate, and so on. Each one is a line on the bill of materials, because each one is a part somebody has to order and engrave.
Dimensions and leaders
Pick the dimension tool, click the two edges you are measuring, move out to where the dimension line should sit, and click to place it. The leader tool works the same way: click where the note goes, then click what it points at.
Afterwards, with the select tool and the view picked up, click a dimension or a leader to select it. It turns blue.
- Drag a dimension and only its offset moves — how far off the object the dimension line sits. The two edges it measures are locked, so the number on the sheet cannot be changed by dragging it. A dimension reports the panel, not where somebody dropped it.
- Drag a leader by the handle at its label end. The arrow stays on whatever it is pointing at, and the line rotates and extends to follow.
- Delete or Backspace removes the selected one.
A view has to be selected before it will take any of this — click it once to pick it up. That is also what stops the scroll wheel re-scaling a view you were only passing over.
Paper sizes
A sheet prints at the size it says it is. An A3 sheet comes out A3 with no scaling in the print dialog — leave the browser at 100%.
Views are live. Move a breaker and the sheet moves with it — there is no step where the drawing and the panel are allowed to disagree. Print or export to PDF when it is ready.
3D export
Export the whole enclosure assembly or a single backplate. The model comes out organised: every part named for its reference designator and its component, grouped, and carrying the colours you painted — not one merged lump of triangles.
OBJ and GLB are available now and open in Inventor, SolidWorks, Blender and anything else that reads them. STEP export is in progress.
Working with other people
A cloud project opens read-only. To edit part of it you check it out: right-click a backplate or enclosure in the tree and choose Unlock for editing, or use the button on the read-only bar that appears above the properties. While you hold it, others see it locked by you; when you are done it goes back.
A lock covers what it names. Holding a backplate lets you edit that backplate; changing the enclosure — its size, model, plates or placement — needs the enclosure checked out, because that is the piece your save writes. If you try without it, a prompt names the node you need and offers to unlock it in one click. Holding an enclosure covers the backplates inside it, except any that a colleague has checked out themselves.
Because check-out is per node, two people can work on different backplates of the same project at the same time, and each save keeps the other's work. If a browser closes or drops offline, its locks go stale after a minute and anyone can take them over.
Keyboard shortcuts
| Ctrl + S | Save |
| Ctrl + Z | Undo |
| Ctrl + Y | Redo |
| Ctrl + C / V | Copy / paste |
| Ctrl + click | Add to selection |
| Delete | Delete selection |
| Esc | Cancel placing, or close a dialog |
| Scroll | Zoom |
| Alt + drag | Pan |
The full list is in the app under File → Keyboard shortcuts.
Something wrong?
There is a bug report button in the bottom-right corner of the app. It takes a screenshot of what you are looking at and sends it with the report, which saves a great deal of describing.