Where is iCopy on Inventor 2014 Pro

[Anonymous]

All of the tutorial say go to the Assemble ribbon in the Component Panel and select iCopy...  Mine has Place and Create, then on the pulldown has Replace, Make Layout, and ShrinkWrap .... no iCopy... The Manage ribbon has the iCopy Author, but I have yet to find iCopy...

Any ideas?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

OK, I just found it under Pattern 's dropdown...

Anyway to make the panels wider? (so these options aren't hidden... plenty of blank empty ribbon available)

[pcrawley]

A little known trick is to click the application menu (the big "I" in the top left corner of the UI) and start typing the function you are looking for.  It'll then direct you to the tab and group where that command is located.  It's really handy when commands go missing between versions of Inventor!

iCopy (like "Make Layout" and several other really useful tools) got buried in 2014's UI so the ribbons would fit a standard 1024x768 screen without cutting icons off.  The useful tools were apparently classed as "advanced functionality" and therefore hidden so that only advanced users would be able to find them 😉

You can customise really easily ribbon to include all your old favourites - but that's another advanced feature.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply and the tip! (Interesting enough it can't find iCopy either 🙂 But that will be useful for other times... Thanks!

On the location, I did figure out how to move them to the main panel... (open drop-down, right click on command and select "Move to Main Panel"... likewise right click on command to hide and select "Move to Expanded Panel".

Also it would help if the tutorials and help files labeled for "2014" had the correct location in them... It is kind of difficult to follow a tutorial that is incorrect.

Thanks again for your help.

[eljoseppo]

Thx for the hint. The Ribbon layout is still full of suprises. BTW do you know what is the key shortcut for this "I" in the left corner? There should be one...

[pcrawley]

Alt+F

If you press the Alt key, all the keyboard shortcuts appear over the icons.  (Another useful feature of the ribbon!)

[scottmoyse]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks for the reply and the tip! (Interesting enough it can't find iCopy either 🙂 But that will be useful for other times... Thanks!

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It does find it for me though:

[kstate92]

In my 2014 Pro, this search function will only return iCopy matches when in an iam file.

[scottmoyse]

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@kstate92 wrote:

In my 2014 Pro, this search function will only return iCopy matches when in an iam file.

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Ok well, I was in an iam. So that explains it. iCopy is an assembly only tool though, right?

[kstate92]

I think so, though I can't recall using it.  I just had 2014 running when I read this thread and was curious about my search results.

[pcrawley]

iCopy is an assembly-environment tool.

You "author" an assembly (even if it only contains a single part).

When you place an authored iCopy assembly, you are effectively placing a new sub-assembly - so again, that's an assembly-environment function.

Looking for iCopy functions in a part-environment isn't going to yield a result.

(And whilst I'm here, iCopy is spectacularly under-utilized tool because it can create whole new parts and assemblies AND DRAWINGS with resorting to any complex parametric design/programming knowledge whatsoever.  Mix in a splash of iLogic and this tool really works miracles.)