Placing Recent Items

[Ben-Cornelius]

When placing parts and sub assemblies into assemblies  a lot of the time you are either placing an item you have just created that's open or have recently created or there are item that you have been placing in quite regularly. There is no way to access these recent items to place in even though the welcome screen has a recent items. Instead you have to keep going through the folders to find theses not very productive. I think this could work in several ways and would be good to have all these options.

1. An extension of an earlier idea of mine is to have a list of recent items on a browser tab in which you could drag them into the graphics window.

2. For items that are open you could drag them from the tab into the graphics window

3. when pressing place you could tick a recent items box which would then display all the recent items with no folders.

[mikeh2]

I submitted the drag from tab years ago and still would like to see it.  Kinda like you can do with Excel,  drag a sheet from one XLS file into different XLS file.

Thanks!

[ljordan]

You can already do this, although nowhere near as intuitive.  I would like to see them implement your idea, but this can get you by.

[Anonymous]

My work around is that I use ctrl+c and paste from the most recently created part file and paste it within the assembly.

[Josh_Hunt]

I like the recently placed list.

My current method is to scroll to the bottom of the browser and drag the component right from to the active assembly for another instance.

Copy and paste in the graphics window works well too. Similar to AutoCAD blocks.

[Anonymous]

Could we include a "part bucket" as well?  Sometimes I put together an assembly and I know roughly what I'll need, but I'm not positive.  So I place one of each part I think I might need and copy/paste as a I need them.  Maybe I could put some stuff in the part bucket and simply not place them.

[mikeh2]

Down the same lines of copy and drag.  An intern asked me if there was a short cut in IV to place another instance and my answer was CTRL C, CTRL V and he replied w/ Solid Works let you CTRL drag and it creates another instance.  Much like Windows Explorer does.  Or the way SolidWorks does.  Makes a lot of sense.

2014 doesn't do it, didn't download 2015 yet.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Copy and paste works if you want to paste a part from the part file itself.  If you've got one part in the assembly, click and drag from the browser to the work area will create a copy (except for fittings I believe, but fittings are weird since they don't like being moved up and down folders unless they're copy and pasted) without any keys.

[jporter]

Another good way to do this would be to have a Place Last button in the Place drop down. 

[DRoam]

Please consider voting here for another very needed addition to the Place/Open dialogs: Open/Place Search Box (13 votes).

[DRoam]

Another related idea: Open File & Place Component Dialog boxes

[DRoam]

In addition to a "Recents" list, it would also be very helpful to have a "Currently Open" list. This would save so much time.

Also, here's another related idea: REPLACE COMPONENT WITH ALREADY OPEN FILES

[dan_szymanski]

Idea added to backlog for future consideration [26023]. Thanks!

[noahholweck]

ops... won't let me delete this.

[Hunteil]

Unfortunately the trend is if there's a workaround, Inventor devs won't implement the idea. 😞 But I will say, I had a coworker ask how to do this (b/c he's coming from Solidworks) and I looked into it. I found that you can use a few of the following workarounds:

1. Copy part from an opened assembly and paste in your new assembly. (My go to method.)
2. You can open the .ipt and select the part name at the top of the tree and copy it. Then paste it in your new assembly.
3. You can also open windows explorer. (You know a basic folder) And you can click and drag the .ipt directly into your assembly. (fantastic!)
   • WARNING DO NOT do the same trick from the Vault Client!!!!! It for some reason copies the model file and places it into a temp folder. When in doubt, open the part's iProperties and check the file location field. You can also see something is wrong by looking at the Vault tree tab. So at least we're aware of that now. Maybe this is intentional. And maybe it's a default setting you can change elsewhere? (If anyone knows how, plz share ty.)