Inventor Drawing Balloon Tip – Not Updating?

by David Gate

The way balloons work in Inventor is really handy. If you ever reposition the leader arrow onto another part it updates the balloon value to match. This way you never accidentally balloon something incorrectly.

I came across a situation where moving an arrow leader I couldn’t get it to snap to any other components. Notice how the image below shows me moving the leader arrow and hovering over another component. Normally it highlights in red. Like in the process above. But because it doesn’t highlight red the number doesn’t update and the arrow changes to a black circle.

Now this confused me for a minute until I worked out what was causing this. I had changed my selection criteria from Edges to Parts.

So if you are using and editing balloons you need to make sure that your selection criteria is set to Edge Priority and they behave as you would expect and keep an eye out for the red edges highlighting.