How do I save assembly as a STEP file?

[benzerar]

I am new to Autodesk Inventor and the person I am collaborating with told me to send my assembly to them as a STEP file. Before I send it to him I have been saving it to my desktop and trying to open it to make sure that it works, but it seems to be blank (as in a pop-up window emerges that asks what program I want to open the file with and Inventor is not one of the options, the icon on my desktop is just a white page). Am I doing something wrong? I go to export and save it as a STEP file but am I supposed to save the parts as a STEP file as well, and put everything in a folder or something? I just need to send him this assembly because it is a part in a bigger assembly that we are collaborating on, and he is the one putting together the larger assembly. 

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I think I know what you are seeing. This is a behavioral change due to supporting STEP AnyCAD workflow (associative import) starting from 2017. When you import the STEP back to Inventor, Inventor will detect that you already have the same named components loaded in the memory and reject the import. I personally think a better messaging is needed here to avoid confusion.

What you can do is to launch two Inventor sessions. One is to export to STEP. and the other one is to import it back for checking purpose. The other way, without having to launch two sessions, is to save as (or rename) the STEP file so that Inventor will treat it like a different component than the one loaded in the memory.

Many thanks!

[SBix26]

First question: what is the file size of the STEP file?  The answer to this tells you a lot: a few kB? no good; many MB? very likely a successful translation.

Saving an Inventor assembly as STEP file includes all the parts, but it won't open from your desktop by double clicking.  If you want to see the geometry, you will have to open it from Inventor.  But a much easier way is to open it with Notepad.  Notepad won't show you any geometry, but a STEP file is human readable text, so you can get a very good idea of what's in it.

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Sam B
Inventor Pro 2019.0.1 | Windows 7 SP1
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