I have had the opportunity to try out Inventor at a vacant station in my brother's laboratory (since it stays open late) where they have Inventor 5 (I think it's 5.0, actually). I'm doing this to try to teach myself, using a 3rd party book and the help files - just enough so that I can determine whether or not Inventor would be practical and cost effective for my design/drafting dept where I work. Unfortunately, I do have a lot of experience with Autocad, so that means I have absolutely no skills that I can use with Inventor, it seems. The two seem about as similar as fire & water. One particular problem I'm having is using & (especially) manipulating work/sketch planes. There doesn't seem to be much help on that subject - I know you can pick a planar surface to create a work plane, and you can offset to create a new one, but getting one positioned at an obscure angle is escaping me. I know this probably sounds pretty dumb to any of you experienced users out there, but I really miss being able to simply enter coordinates and use .xy .xz filters for acurately positioning things. I realize that Inventor takes a different approach - draw it wrong first, then correct it with dimensions and constraints, but this seems more time-consuming. When trying to draw a sketch accurately, the Precise Input toolbar only seems to work a very limited portion of time, and then not nearly as well as Autocad's command line input. The simple shapes given in the tutorials seem easy enough, but the kind of casting shapes I run into at work seem fairly daunting, and would require many work planes at different angles and positions to one another. Someone please tell me this gets a whole lot quicker & easier once one knows what they're doing, because right now, I'm not finding myself wanting to recommend this program for use in my department. And tell me why sometimes I can delete something on a sketch, and other times I'm not given the Delete option on the right-click menu. I think I must have bought the wrong 3rd part book - it only tells you how to do something, but not what to do if something is not cooperating like that. Help!
-Chris