Opening inventor files from hyperlinks in excel blacks out ribbon

[Chad.Snyder8B8AB]

We are trying to open inventor files from a hyperlink in excel. We have found this works as you would expect it to if you have inventor open already. 

If you don't have an instance of inventor open, it will start inventor and open the file, except the ribbon will be completely blacked out. 

We have tried this on multiple different machines and all with the same results. Not sure why or how this works like this. I searched and found one person on these forums doing the same thing having the same results of the blacked out ribbon (but not sure about if inventor is already opened if they were able to have it work) and that was back in 2015. we are running 2021 professional. 

[mluterman]

I'm doing that right now (screenshot of my "Part Number Book" below with hyperlinks); I guess I'm the other guy on the forum doing this-LOL.

Although I've seen the "black ribbon" on occasion, closing & restarting Inventor always solved that (and I haven't seen one in quite some time).

We are using IV 2023.1 (latest) and I have Excel 2016.

I did notice, however, that since you are opening those files outside of Inventor (from the Windows environment), I sometimes have to re-link the files, whereas, when I open the same file from within Inventor, I get no such requirement.

[Anonymous]

Bear with me on this as it may or may not have much to do on this matter, but could.

I recall years back (and I have to assume it's still the case today) that one should never open an Inventor file like you would a typical Office file, like Word, Excel, etc by the typical navigating to the directory and double clicking it. Same deal if you used Vault. For lack of a better explanation, it risked corrupting the file.

Best practice was always to open the application (Inventor) and using Inventor to open the file, either from your local drive or from Vault (using the Vault icons in the Inventor ribbon menu).

I have to think this process you are using is causing these issues??? Just a thought.

***update*** Chad, yes, that's one of the issues I've seen when opening assemblies in that manner.

[Chad.Snyder8B8AB]

have you tried to open a file thru your hyperlink when inventor isn't open already? 

It seems to work when inventor is open, but if inventor is closed is when we get the blacked out ribbon. I don't think this will be much of an issue for most of the time as we usually have inventor open, but would like to see if we can get a solution to this if we can. Seems like at least one other had the same issue from back in 2015. but no solution to that persons thread was shown. 

[Chad.Snyder8B8AB]

That is interesting to hear as I have never heard that and have done that over the years without issue. I have a coworker who that is the only way he opens inventor files is thru windows explorer. 

I also would think that if I tried opening thru a hyperlink and got the black ribbon, if i then tried opening it thru windows explorer, i would also get the black ribbon. But that is not the case. If I open thru windows explorer, it opens like normal. it is just when opening from a hyperlink in an excel file.

[mluterman]

Have you done your windows & graphics driver updates? You're also using an "old" version of Inventor. What about your version of Excel? Without having a good (read: latest) baseline of products/updates installed, it's hard to diagnose; at least you could take all those things out of the equation if that was the case.

[Anonymous]

Yes, I've known people have done so for a long time as well, but it does risk issues.

This has been the case for a number of years. Not sure why it's not more well known, but is considered bad practice.

Years ago, I want to say maybe like for release 2010 or even earlier, when users did this practice it would spawn a new instance of the application. I had one user who at one point hit me up for the issue his system was running extremely slow, I noticed he had 40 odd instances of Inventor open, one for each file he worked on during the day. This has obviously been fixed.

I have to assume you are still using .idw for your Inventor drawings as opposed to .dwg???

If so, not only are you losing out on a lot of Autocad/Inventor interoperability for both you and your clients, but by default, system configurations are set to open .dwg files as Autocad files. This is where you'll see posts where users question why when they double-click an inventor Drawing it opens Acad instead....that's why.

One has to change the system settings to avoid this issue, but the benefits of the interoperability far outweighs making that minor change. If you are using .dwg for Inventor drawings, and doing the double-click practice, the setting was already changed for you.

Then add in the broken links issues as stated and so on so on.....

I'd rather be safe than sorry and open files the way they are supposed to be opened.

I don't open MS Excel in order to open a Word document.

Following best practices for the application will reduce a lot of errors users experience.

[Chad.Snyder8B8AB]

I will have to have our IT department run thru and make sure everything is up to date. Inventor is up to date for 2021. we only update that every few years. But I can have them check the other things to see what updates can or need be done. 

[Chad.Snyder8B8AB]

we do use .dwg to save down to and not .idw. Typically I only use one instance of inventor. Occasionally I will have a 2nd instance but that's rare. 

The reason for us to do this isn't for a normal operation. We keep an excel list of all the equipment designed for a particular job. This is a quick list that anyone can open up old jobs to see what equipment was used on that job. We were trying to hyperlink this list so that we can open it directly from that excel list. When someone comes in to look at something, we pull that list up. look up the equipment and find the filename. Then have to go to inventor and/or windows explorer and search for that filepath and name to open it. So this was looked at to reduce that time of hunting for the files. 

But we use this list often enough that it would be a nice time saver. I don't understand why there would be an issue if you open a file from windows explorer versus using the inventor open file dialog box or opening from a hyperlink. But will look into that for sure. 

as I said before, it opens correctly if we have an instance of inventor open already. but if you don't have an instance open, it opens an instance of inventor but blacks out the ribbon. So it just seems like a strange situation.