Noob questions on Altium Libraries

[Sahiru.Dilan]

Hi everyone,
I am new here and this is my first post.
I have been using Eagle CAD and decided to use Altium for my future projects. I have followed some tutorials on YouTube. As I understood we have to create our own libraries for components that we are going to use. In Eagle we had some generic libraries. But in Altium we do not. Well I think it is really useful and professional to create my own schematic symbol and footprint for components. As we include the manufacturer part number in the process at the end of the designing I get all the prices for the BOM and part numbers. This is really useful.

My question is this. Let's say I have to use the same 0603 100K resistor for like 10 PCBs. Then will I be creating the same library 10 times? Or is there a way to save that as an integrated library and use the component across all my PCBs?

The other thing I am wondering is this. Let's say 0603 100K and 0603 150K resistors are there. The footprints will be almost the same. So can I use the same library component for both and just update the value and Part number parameters?

Also is there a way to copy a symbol and use it? Drawing a Zig-Zag symbol for a resistor was really hard for me 

Thank you for adding me to the forum.
Best of luck to all of you

[thm_w]

There are many generic libraries available for Altium.

Newer versions use the Vault, older versions just came with files: https://techdocs.altium.com/display/ADOH/Download+Libraries

Whether you want to have one part in your integrated library (intlib) for a 100k and one for a 150k, or one generic part "xk" resistor is up to you.
Generally for industry use the former is recommended, as there is less chance of mixing up part numbers.

You should look at some starting tutorials, maybe Feranecs courses.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJQkHVpk3A8bgDmPlJlOJOA

[Pseudobyte]

For basic symbols you can find alot of them in C:\Users\Public\Documents\Altium\AD20\Library or ADXX depending on your version. Then you can copy the symbols from the library into your new library and modify the values. Once you are more comfortable in the tool you can start to think about using dblibs.

[ajb]

One of the best ways to promote symbol reuse is to use a database library.  You create your schematic symbols and footprints separately, then create a database that links the two along with whatever other information you want for each component.  You can use Access or even Excel as the database.  Creating a new resistor value is as simple as duplicating an existing row and changing the part number and value.

There are a number of threads on this forum on how to set this all up and discussions of what information to include or exclude from the database, just search for 'dblib'.