From the course: Autodesk Inventor 2022 Essential Training

Home dashboard - Inventor Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Inventor 2022 Essential Training

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Home dashboard

- [Instructor] When you first open Autodesk Inventor, you're presented with the home dashboard. This page brings together the things you'll most commonly need when you're just getting started in Autodesk Inventor. There's three different sections on this page that we'll quickly discuss. There's a New section that has the templates for each of the individual file types you can create. There's the project section with shortcut and file detail information. And finally, Recent Documents. In the New section, you have individual templates for the types of files that you can create an Autodesk Inventor. You have part files, assembly files, drawing files, and presentation files. What's important to know about these is during the installation, you made some selections, what standards you're going to use and what units you're going to use, for example. Depending on those selections, these items will be launching different templates. I selected inch when I installed, therefore, any of these parts or assembly files that I create are going to be using an inch template. If you selected metric, these templates will be linked to metric. If at any point during the design process, you need one of the other options that you didn't select during install, you can go to the launch panel and select the New button. Here on the left, you can expand the folder and actually see your English, metric, and any other templates that you may have installed. To the right of that is the project section. This lets you quickly select which project you're going to be working on in Inventor. Right now, I have the Inventor 2020 Essentials selected, indicated by the green check mark. What this does is points to a specific location on my hard drive or network, where the files for this project are stored. I can easily switch between projects by simply hovering over a project I want to activate and selecting the green check mark. You can switch back and forth at any time as needed. And we'll learn more about creating projects further in this course. Next, you have shortcuts and file details. Shortcuts are just locations on the hard drive that you can make a quick path to. For example, if, for a project you're working on, somebody gave you a folder of images that are helpful, you can make a quick shortcut path to this. Next, you have the file detail section. This allows you to see the metadata related to any of the recent documents. For example, if I select Engine.ipn, or Engine.ipt, you can see that this information is updated and it includes things like where it's located on the hard drive, the type of file it is, when it was created, who the author is, things along those lines. And then finally, you have the Recent Document section. This just simply shows you the documents you've most recently been working with. And if, for example, you were working in the assembly most often, you can use the pin icon in the upper right-hand corner to pin that to the top of the recent document section. The other documents are still maintained, but the one you're using most frequently is at the top. When that changes, you can simply uncheck that option to return it to the Recent Document section. To the left of that, you'll see some quick filters. These come in handy when you have multiple files that are showing in the recent documents, and you just quickly want to filter them. For example, if I don't want to see assemblies and I uncheck this option, you'll see that the assembly is removed from the recent documents. I can simply check that again and it's returned. If for any reason, this window ever gets closed by using the X on the tab, or the X in the upper right-hand corner, it can be reopened by going to the my home panel and selecting the home button. Before we move on, there's a couple of configuration options that are worth talking about. Flip, Reset, and Maximize Recent. Flip simply flips the dialog box so the recent documents is on the top, and New and Projects are down below. If you select Maximize Recent, it's a very similar format, except the New and Project sections are reduced to take up less space on the screen. And then finally, if you just want to reset everything into back to the way it was, the Reset button will do that for you.

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