User Manual

learnIng the FIle tyPes In Inventor
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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 accustomed to having the DWG (.dwg) file format as your primary
file format; in Microsoft Word you will use primarily just a DOC (.doc) file; and in Microsoft
Excel, you will use the XLS (.xls) file type for most of the work you do. All three of these com-
monly used programs use a single primary file type throughout. Inventor, on the other hand,
follows the structure common 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 the data load is distributed into many different
files instead of having all information in one file. For instance, you use an IPT (.ipt) file to cre-
ate an Inventor part file, an IAM (.iam) file to assemble that part with other parts, and an IDW
(.idw) file 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. For example, when you open
an assembly made of 12 different part files, only the information concerning the file paths and
the way the parts fit together in the assembly is loaded along with the information required to
display the parts. Only when you decide to edit a part is the information about all of that part’s
features loaded. As you’ve already explored in the previous section, having different file types
allows you to use environment-specific tools.
Another payoff of multiple file types is exemplified in the comparison between the way
AutoCAD handles tasks related to model space/paper space and the way 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.
Figure 1.25
Compare the avail-
able options for
these two extrude
dialog boxes.
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