I'm trying create a gear. It would be nice if I could actually make an involute curve. Is it something that has to be done with VBA? Or could I use a spreadsheet and import it into Inventor?
How accurate is your machining process? You can define an involute curve (spline) for a gear with as few as 5 points that is better than most manufacturing processes can hold on the tolerance. Of course if you don't need a true involute simply used the Wellman's Odontograph form in the Inventor Design Accelerators.
I'm stuck with Version 9. I don't think an accelerator is available but that forum looks good. I'll spend some time looking through those threads.
For now I'm just making assembly drawings and I want the parts to look fairly close to what they are. But you're right - for this just an approximation will work fine.
My memory might be failing but I think DAcc for gears was in Inventor 9. You must be in an assembly file iam and click on the down arrow next to the Assembly Panel.