I am running Inventor 2008 and have recently created a few models. All of the models I have created have been linked to external spreadsheets at the part and assembly levels. Everything for a complete model is in a single folder, the spreadsheet and all parts, assemblies and drawings. With my previous models I was taking the entire folder and copying it to new locations to make slightly different models. When I would do this all the links of the copied parts were pathing to the copied spreadsheet, not the original, which is what I want. With my most recent model the copied parts are still pathing to the original spreadsheet. Can anyone tell me why this might be happening?
P.S.: I tried to get around this by doing a pack and go and ended up with the same issue.
Any help is appreciated.
I've played with Design Assistant some but I really don't know how to use it. All I've been able to find that appears useful in the design assistant is the copy design properties option but it seems to want a destination file. I need an option to simply copy an entire design and update all links to the newly copied files.
That is what it does look it up in the help or there is a you tube video I seen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXu5spVKtGE
I use it all the time to copy assemblies and links works great...
So I used Design Assistant and was able to copy the parts and assemblies to a new location with links intact, the video was very helpful. My only problem now is that the spreadsheet that drives all the models, and the drawings assosciated with the various copied parts, did not copy with the parts.
Are you using vault?
I'm not, my company tried to start up vault a long time before I got here and they made a mess of it and no one here can access it anymore. I know that vault would be the ideal fix for this since it's become pretty clear to me that Inventor is meant to be used with vault. My manager has been trying to get me to make this work without spending any money on software or training but I really don't think that's going to be possible. Hopefully after the fifth time I tell him this isn't going to work he'll give in.
I appreciate your help though.
There is a step in that video they left out I could not find my video I will look more for it or look in the help in the lower section on design assistants is a find link documents I watched that vedoe and it did not show this sorry should have watched the whole video.
If you cannot find help in the help I will try and make a new video and post..
So I dug through the help section on Design Assistant and couldn't find any help for my issue. The help did mention externally referenced files, but only to say, "You cannot use Design Manager to work with links to external files such as Mechanical Desktop parts, word processing, spreadsheet, or text files." If you are confident that you can make this work though please let me know how. Thanks