who has used inventor

I've been using it since it came out. Been using SW about a year. What immediately comes to mind that i like better abot IV is:

1) The feel and interface of the whole product 2) Much simpler use of equations and user parameters 3) Weldments that don't create additional files 4) Explosion views in a separate file 5) Assembly constraint interface

What I like about SW:

1) Configurations 2) System color control 3) ?? (I know there is more)

Aar> Just wondering how many people have used Invntor? what is you impresion?

It might be worth your time to Google this thread. It comes up every so often and people have given very good detailed input before. I used it for a few months earlier in the year. The project that I was working on did not cause me to push it very far so my input is probably of little value. There were a few things which it did better than SW and much that it did not.

Both packages have had new releases since my experience so the list of goods and bads has changed. Anyway, it is really difficult to make judgments based on other's opinions. What is best for my job may not be best for yours. I think you need to take the company into account as well - development direction, support, and etcetera. It is my experience that, although they could do better, SW as a company is well ahead of ADESK.

I also believe that price should be low on the priority list when comparing. In the long run it takes very little increase in productivity to make up for the cost of the software.

JJ

Nathan, Takes on Inventor:

1)Quite a few Inventor users have issues with iges files being imported into it. 2)Adaptivity commands in large assemblies is a nightmare you can take coffee breaks many times before it is done. 3) there were some sketch constraint issues in version 7? 4)New price structure surprise to existing users (thats Autodesk for you) on having to pay more for the professional version for features that used to be found in base product. 5)People have had crashing issues when switching between the modeling environment and drawing environment when dealing with medium size assemblies or larger. We are talking people with 2gb of RAM having the issue so there must be a memory leak in the program somewhere. 6) Perhaps the main reason is that Autodesk has a history of screwing over its customers. I know this from personal experience.

Used it for a few months before getting a new job in March where they use SW.

As I recall it did a better job a handling interference checks and collision checks with sub-assemblies - it only looked a interferences and collision at the assembly level, and not in the sub-assy as well (SW has been driving me nuts with this problem today)

Also handles dymanic (movable) assemblies better that SW. I find that if you don't leave SW flexible sub-assys in the right place when you close the assy file, you have mate problems when you open the assembly later.

Equations and variable are much superiour in Inventor. SW is so cumbersome, I never use them anymore.

Inventor did not have configurations though. They're a feature of SW I'd really miss.

This newsgroup tends to be fanatical about SW, and IMHO tends to unjustly slag Inventor.

If you already use SW I doubt it would be worth the time trouble and $$ to switch.

Rob

They are there but only for parts but that's not helping at all at the end