Datasheet

learnIng the FIle tyPes In Inventor
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Because the task of creating a surface extrusion is different than creating a solid extrusion
some options are simply grayed out and not available. You will notice this throughout Inventor
as options are offered and suppressed depending upon the task at hand. You can close the
drawing file you have open without saving changes and continue on to the next section.
Learning the File Types in Inventor
In AutoCAD, you might be used to having the .dwg file format as your main file format, in
Microsoft Word you might use primarily just a .doc file, and in Microsoft Excel you might use
the .xls file type for most of the work you do. All three of these commonly used programs use
a single primary file type throughout. Inventor, on the other hand, follows the structure com-
mon to most other 3D modelers in the engineering field today, and uses different file types for
different tasks.
Why So Many File Types?
The purpose of using multiple file types is so that the data load is distributed into many differ-
ent files, instead of placing all information in one file. For instance, you use an .ipt file to create
an Inventor part file, an .iam to assemble that part with other parts, and then you use an IDW to
make a detail drawing of the parts and the assembly.
Placing the data in multiple files permits quicker load times, promotes file integrity, and
vastly improves performance across the board on large designs. As an example, when you open
an assembly made of 12 different part files, only the information concerning the file paths, the
way the parts fit together in the assembly, and the information required to display the parts is
loaded. Only when you decide to edit a part is the information about all of the parts features
loaded. As you’ve already explored in the previous section, having different file types allows
you to have environment-specific tools for working with each file type, as well.
Another payoff of multiple file types is exemplified in the comparison between the way
that AutoCAD handles model space/paper space and the way that Inventor handles the same
tasks. To put it simply, in Inventor the part and assembly files are the model (model space), and
the drawing file is in effect paper space. Using multiple file types to handle the separate tasks
required for modeling versus detailing simplifies the interaction between both tasks, and as
a result, the headaches of managing model space and paper space that exists in AutoCAD are
eliminated in Inventor.
Here are the primary file formats commonly used in Inventor:
.ipj
•u : Inventor project file - is used to manage file linking paths
.ipt
•u : Inventor single part file -is used to create individual parts
.iam
•u : Inventor assembly file - is used to assemble part together
.ipn
•u : Inventor presentation file - is used to create exploded views of assemblies
.idw
•u : Inventor 2D detail drawing file - is used to detail part, assembly and presentation files
.dwg
•u (Inventor): Inventor 2D detail drawing file - just like the IDW, DWG is used to detail
part, assembly and presentation files
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