Sheet Set Manager for Inventor Drawings

[Curtis_Waguespack]

There is a need for many fabrication type design departments to create sheet sets for their drawings. Currently Inventor's multisheet drawings have a number of shortcomings for doing this. Something like AutoCAD's Sheet manager tool in Inventor would help with many of the issues. See this link:

http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com/2011/05/using-autocad-sheet-set-manager-with.html

[cbenner]

The only drawback I see to sheet sets, is that in Vault, you have to print the dwf of each sheet one at a time.  With the Inventor multi sheet drawings, one click prints the dwf of all sheets.  I know Vault has a batch plot function, but that won't work on the Item Master dwf with the Watermark.  Put a batch plot function down on that window, and now we're cooking with gas.

[mslosar]

I'd love a sheet set feature as well.

At least in Autocad, if you have 6 layouts on a single dwg file, they are listed in the sheet set as separate sheets and you can easily print any one or combination of them. You are not restricted to printing all the sheets in a dwg.

We're using dwgs with inventor here and the sheets work just fine in autocad sheet sets, but you can't access all the sheet set parameters through Inventor, you've got to load the file up in autocad.

The only real issues this causes are having to use autocad for sheet set work.

Sure, I can use the Task Scheduler to print multiple sheets/files, but you wind up setting it up and adding whatever sheets you want/need every time. One of the things I love about sheet sets is being able to select any number/combination of sheets and shoot them to any printer i choose with maybe 2-3 clicks. No opening the files, no opening another program, no opening another dialog, just hover over the sheet set bar and boom, a couple clicks and the sheets are printing.

Something else that sheets sets would bring would be parameters that can be shared throughout a project. I can put job and customer info in my titleblocks using the sheet set. Then, I make a change in the sheet set paramters and instantly reflected on however many drawing sheets I have in the project in question whether it's 3 or 3000 sheets. There doesn't seem to be any real method of doing that in inventor right now.

[mbunds]

Well, it's the end of July, 2015, and we have a brand new install of Autodesk Product Design Suite 2015 on a $20,000.00 + BOXX workstation which runs with our complex models better than ever, yet Inventor drawing sets still bring this machine to a crawl.

Our Inventor drawings created in-house are limited to one sheet per set, but some of our customers insist on combining as many as 150 sheets in a set, with multiple views of the top level assembly scattered throughout. Needless to say, these are exceptionally cumbersome to work with, so our first task is to break these sets into smaller sets based on common assemblies, which speeds things up substantially.

Unfortunately, many of these same customers also tend to split section and detail views from one sheet and apply them to others, making the separation of these sheets impossible without breaking the links to the master views. It would be nice to have functions available to make splitting these sets created without the application of best practices (this is Autodesk's fault as well; if our customers had decent sheet set management available, they probably wouldn't have created these monsters).

Since the final output of ANY CAD software is an engineering drawing, or set thereof, Autodesk went way off track by failing to address the most important aspect of CAD software output, in Inventor anyway, that being the possibility of creating and managing a set of independent drawings related to a design. Inventor's ability to provide design intent validation is astounding, but it is crippled by the absence of tools that could enhance communications through drawing sets. We work in energy, oil, and gas, industry sectors that are notoriously slow to adapt new technologies, so much of our communication is still done on hard-copy, but even our tech-savy customers still require hard-copy data sets, including well-organized drawing sets.

Sheet set management in Inventor is so sorely lacking functionality that more often than not, the time saved by Inventors' fast parametric modeling is nullified by its abysmal performance when managing native drawing sets, as well as when the AutoCad sheet manager must be used to create and manage sheet sets composed of single .dwg files.

Inventor sheet manager also doesn't provide functions that ease creation of a drawing index, and I find it to be deplorable that every drawing in an Inventor set is assigned the same drawing number as derived from the i-properties of the set, even though it knows how to number the pages.

My transition from AutoCad to Inventor was an experience in amazement, both at its capabilities, and in the functionality that it lacks or provides poorly. Amazement that some of the most commonly used conveniences present in AutoCad were, and still are, lacking in such a supposedly more advanced program.

It's been long enough, and there have been many requests by others for these features. We should be able to get this done without employing draconian "work-arounds" and custom programming of scripts.

A good start would be to get with the AutoCad group and integrate the sheet set manager into Inventor, so user's don't have to use AutoCad as a drawing set management tool!

[PaulMunford]

Now that the AutoCAD, Inventor and Vault teams are in the same group, perhaps we could get a little more traction on this idea?

I used to use the AutoCAD sheet set manager to manage both AutoCAD and Inventor Drawings with Vault. It worked, but there where some bugs that never got ironed out...

It's time we had our own Inventor native Sheet set manager!

Some advantages of sheet sets:

• Change project variables (such as client name) in one place and have them update through the entire sheet set.
• Find individual drawings in the sheet set without having to know which (Multi-sheet) drawing file they are stored in.
• Batch plot some or all sheets to printer or PDF with a right click.
• Plan work ahead of time, by creating sheets in advance ready to be used.
• Report on work completed by creating a Sheet List table, showing how many drawings have been completed, issued for approval, Revision etc
• Hyper link details across multiple drawing files.

[ali.jahed]

Great tool to have in Inventor...

Any update???