New info for Inventor Users

Autodesk Inventor
As most of you know, or will come to find out, I am a big fan of the Autodesk Inventor products (and those that went before it). As I write this at the end of September 2009, we have seen Inventor come a long way from its beginnings. I would imagine most of you, at one time or another took some kind of training course. For most users that was an “Introduction”, or “Level One” class. Some of you might have even taken more advanced or in-depth training on a specific topic of Inventor. From the time you took your class to now, Inventor has kept evolving, growing, and ‘changing.’ Over the years Autodesk has continually added to the product, and with 2010 made its first significant change to the way it looks (and give it room for future growth).

During this past summer, I/we started exploring how people were using Inventor, where they were having success, where there were gaps in knowledge, what people were interested in finding out about Inventor. Some people just wanted to “catch up.”

Well, the number of topics that people were interested in was huge. Some of the pieces of the puzzle are very easy to communicate, and some much more complex. We started looking for ways to deliver the content our users wanted. We explored creating classes in a variety of ways, half-day, all day, then we looked at on-line. One thing that has changed in the last few years is the number of sources of information. Used to be you just called your Autodesk dealer and asked questions. However, these days, the amount of information on-line is just shy of overwhelming. There are discussion groups (Autodesk and AUGI, not to mention others), there are tips and tricks pages, there is You Tube (hundreds, if not thousands of videos on Inventor), blogs (I even have one), and the ever present facebook.

There is no single answer for everyone. We still run regularly scheduled classes at all three of our offices in California, and we have done one in Las Vegas (more coming). A lot of you just want more, so how do we give it to you. So for the time being here is what we are working on and doing;

I (or we) are going to put together an unending series of articles on various portions of Inventor from A (arcs) to Z (Z-axes). They will be short little articles on a topic, sometimes with links to my blog for more information. We are also going to try to put it up on facebook, where you can link in as a friend and get the updates whenever they are published. We still want your input and ideas, we also need to know you are looking at the articles as to whether or not, what we are doing is helping, or of value – so we keep doing it.

Now the question is, ‘Where do we start?’ Having given this a little thought, I am going to start with sketching (we will come back to the interface soon).

So, on to Episode 1 – Sketching in Inventor Part Modeling.