Extracting connections from hierachical sheet to main sheet

Hi to everyone, does anyone know how to extract schematic from hierachical sheet to main sheet?

A post was merged into an existing topic: KiCAD Hierarchical Labels

I assume this is about kicad from the original post this was attached to.


In general the workflow will differ depending on the exact state of your project. The easiest state to solve is while you do not have started the layout. In this case just block select whatever you want to move (click and drag to select everything inside the box), use the copy command (ctrl+c) change to the root sheet and use paste (ctrl+v). After that you can delete the hierarchical sheet (or rather its instantiation).

This process does however remove the annotation (in kicad v5) and it also loses the original internal identifier. So if you have already a layout then this gets tricky. The only option i can come up with is to manually recreate the annotation and then update the layout with “re associate by footprint reference” to get back the connection between schematic and pcb. For details about the last step of this process see https://forum.kicad.info/t/update-pcb-from-schematics-match-methods/21707

In the current nightly there is also a more direct solution. Here you can copy paste while keeping the reference designators unchanged (via “past special” from the right click context menu). But before you jump to using nightly you might want to take a look at https://forum.kicad.info/t/is-it-a-good-idea-to-use-a-nightly-build-version/9309 Especially as current nightlies already switched to the future file format of version 6. Meaning there is no feasible way to ever get your design back to version 5.


You can of course try to ask over on the kicad forum if you don’t get an answer here as somebody might have a solution that works in the current stable version and is less work than what i explained above.