If you often create a new Drawing style just to change one thing (e.g. color)...

[DRoam]

Just created the following suggestion in the Ideas forum, wanted to publicize it here to hopefully get some momentum going on it:

Apply Style overrides to specific annotations without having to create new Style 

Please vote if you would find it useful, and comment on the Idea with your top Style options that you frequently need to "override" by creating anew Style, and would like to be able to override directly. Thanks for your support.

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi @DRoam 

Having used AutoCAD a great deal in the past, and having dealt with maddening style override issues that users create and employ to workaround company standards/styles, etc... my thought is you should be be banished from the Inventor community for even suggesting it 😄

The mess caused by style overrides often happens as a sort of "drift effect" from copying things forward from old drawings, so I'm not sure it would be as big of an issue in Inventor though... but I would think a "clear overrides" button much like Inventor has in the model environment to clear appearance overrides would be a mandatory part of the implementation of this idea. 

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[-niels-]

There are some things on your list that i think you can do without styles...
If it's just the color of the dimension's text, you can change that...
Arrowheads are easily changed as you already mentioned...
Tolerances can be added to a dimension without making a style for it...

The trick you probably want to use is "copy properties" for those.
Like, you change one dimension to have a tolerance then right-click on it and select "copy properties" and then continue to select all the dimensions that need the same tolerance.
It will copy all changed properties from the dimension, so if you changed the arrowheads or added text, that will be added as well.

Other things from your list wouldn't be possible without a different style though...

[DRoam]

@Curtis_Waguespack, haha wow, strong feelings. I can see how that could be a real problem, especially for AutoCAD drawings. I suppose there needs to be some balance. I think Inventor is way too rigid -- having to create a new style every time you need a different permutation of Style settings is a real pain, and makes the Styles very messy. But AutoCAD is obviously too lenient.

I think providing a few more override options (particularly for things like color and text orientation) wouldn't lead to the "drift effect" too badly. Same goes for making the overrides we already have (tolerance and arrowhead type) work for a multi-selection. These additions would just help us do what we're already doing more easily. It makes sense for these things to be controlled by a standard, but sometimes you need to change them. It would be nice to be able to do so without having to create new Styles... which, arguably, results in a much bigger mess and more opportunity for deviation from the original Standard than just applying an override would.

I definitely agree with you that a Clear Overrides command would be nice to have. Although I really don't think the additional overrides I'm suggesting would lead to very many problems. To be clear, I'm only asking for more Style settings to be overrideable, not all of them.

[DRoam]

Hi Neils, thanks for the feedback. All of those recommendations come with some limitations.

• It's not just the color of the text -- sometimes you need to change the color of the annotation itself, too.
• Arrowheads have to be changed one side at a time, and then one dimension at a time (unless you can use Copy Properties, which isn't always the case. See below).
• Tolerances have to be changed one dimension at a time.
• Copy Properties is only viable if you really want to copy ALL properties to every target dimension. It's not a viable option if you only want to change, say, the arrowhead style for several dimensions. Also, even if copying every property is OK, it's not as straightforward as simply multi-selecting the desired dimensions and making the desired overrides.
• As you said, some of the other things (like annotation color and text orientation) can't be overridden at all without creating a new Style.

So it's true that the existing override functionalities work for some situations, but they're more cumbersome, and they don't work at all for other situations.

[DRoam]

From the feedback so far, maybe I should have broken down the suggestion a bit more and been more specific, maybe into these suggestions:

1. Support overriding annotation color without creating a new Style
2. Support overriding Dimension text orientation without creating a new Style
3. Support multi-select for overriding annotation Style settings (e.g. tolerance, color, text orientation, arrowhead type, etc.)

Those first two are the only (new) Style overrides that I was really wanting. I was thinking a more blanket request, where people could suggest other overrides that are important to them, was a good idea, but maybe that was too broad, especially considering Curtis's point.

Would either of you be more on board with any of those?

[Curtis_Waguespack]

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@DRoam wrote:

From the feedback so far, maybe I should have broken down the suggestion a bit more and been more specific, maybe into these suggestions:

1. Support overriding annotation color without creating a new Style
2. Support overriding Dimension text orientation without creating a new Style
3. Support multi-select for overriding annotation Style settings (e.g. tolerance, color, text orientation, arrowhead type, etc.)

Those first two are the only (new) Style overrides that I was really wanting. I was thinking a more blanket request, where people could suggest other overrides that are important to them, was a good idea, but maybe that was too broad, especially considering Curtis's point.

Would either of you be more on board with any of those?

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I personally haven't encountered the need for myself or other users to do any of these things often enough to feel it would be a priority... but also (and you might know this already) the development team has told us that anything involving Styles and Standard in Inventor is a major undertaking with translates to a high investment of time and money.

Having said that I'll still give it a vote.... there are some things that are really painful to users in one industry that just never hit the radar of other users (such as the revision cloud), and so maybe this is something like that.

[DRoam]

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@Curtis_Waguespack wrote:

... but also (and you might know this already) the development team has told us that anything involving Styles and Standard in Inventor is a major undertaking with translates to a high investment of time and money.

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Hmm interesting, I hadn't heard that. But it doesn't surprise me.... bad systems tend to be the most expensive to do work on 😜 and I don't think anyone ever accused the Styles system of being a sleek and polished experience...

Anyway, thanks for the vote. This may not be something that's in as high demand as I suspected, which doesn't bode well for it if it's also expensive to do. We'll see if it starts collecting votes or not. Either way, thanks for the feedback.

Any additional thoughts or suggestions are welcome.