Hi,

I have come onto using Inventor at a clients request (from Solidworks & NX), and am finding myself astounded by the shoddiness of the way in which Inventor does various things. I am here to check whether this is just me using the program wrong, or whether I am actually operating it correctly (i.e. I don't want to blame my tools if it's me who's at fault).

Now, what I have found, is that inventor almost forces me to model in a slow manner. It actually creates work for me!?

For example, when I start a sketch, I cannot dimension from the origin axes or planes. I have to first project them into the new sketch, creating new entities. Why? Why aren't these automatically directly referencable in all new sketches? Why create new redundant entities for these objects in the first place? I cannot fathom a benefit in doing it this way.

This may seem like a trivial complaint, but it means, for example, that I then have to do two time consuming things as a matter of routine:

1) Carry out the operation of creating these datums in every new sketch (i.e. turn on visibility of the master datums, "include / project geometry" for them all, turn off visibility of the master datums, use the newly created datums, then turn off visibility of the new datums each time I'm done using them, so they don't obscure the rest of my model).

2) Control the visibility of sets of datums under multiple parts, sketches and piping runs. For example, today I made the whole Tube & Piping assembly invisible, then visible again, and this turned on the visibility for all included & projected geometry). From what I can tell, I will have to go through and manually make hundreds of planes invisible now. I could turn off display of user work planes / axes, but this will also obscure any local planes or axes I may need.

This is frustrating because every single occurrence of one of those planes or axes is redundant. They are creating unproductive work for me in managing the above.

In Solidworks there is one master set of datums all referencable from any sketch or feature. There is no redundancy, and visibility is much easier to control.

It seems to me that Inventor is breaking a fundamental rule of good database design. It is encouraging the creation of duplicated entities, whilst adding no new informational content.

Why?

Am I using it wrong?

(I have further examples of terribly frustrating things in Inventor, but don't want to ramble on any more than I have to here, and am really looking for solutions rather than just to moan about Inventor).

Any help / advice would be much appreciated. :)