Inventor 2013 - Two Useful Sketching Shortcuts

by Luke Davenport

As I've been doing a fair amount of Inventor training of late, I thought I'd make a note of two useful shortcuts that may have escaped the notice of even a few grizzled Inventor veterans. Hey there's no shame, you're amongst friends. Here we go:

1)      Hold the CTRL key when drawing in a model sketch to prevent Inventor creating unwanted constraints automatically. 

(You will probably have constraint inference  switched on – right click ‘constraint options’ to check this – and there may be occasions where you DON’T want Inventor to make assumptions). For instance in the picture below you can see I’m inferring a parallel constraint, which I don’t want. Holding CTRL will prevent this, and also any other constraints, like making the line vertical or horizontal. I can then constrain the line or arc exactly how I want it afterwards.

2)      Hold Shift when trimming or extending lines in an Inventor sketch to toggle between trim and extend.

This can really speed up your sketch editing. Select either trim (‘X’ shortcut key) or extend and the shift key will take you to the opposite command. Handily, this will also work with dynamic trimming (click and drag left mouse button to dynamically trim or extend along a route)