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If you're just messing around with Inventor pre-season, I suggest you download Inventor 2012, to get ready for the next season. You can get a free version at autodesk.com/firstbase

If you're stuck with 2010, because you fear the UI changes, fear not you can customize it to look how you want. I really recommend the upgrade.

I find that screwing around in Inventor is a great way to get prepped for an upcoming season, try a few simple projects too if you have some time to kill, it's good practice and is certainly fun. Good luck!

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I have 2011 and 2012 on my computer, one is an actual professional license that connects to an on campus license server for an activity I am in and the other (2012) is the edu license from online. I have only noticed a few UI changes between the two and the "changes" are more of options, you can still do stuff the old way they just may make it slightly more streamlined

But overall it seems to run a little better than the older versions, and probably has some new features.

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Since our team is yet to have a CAD team, I might as well download it. How hard is it to learn by yourself?

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Not difficult at all, it is pretty easy to learn the fundamentals of most CAD packages and there are many resources available to learn.

http://www.atomicrobotics.com/resources/cad/

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Thanks!

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CAD is not really that hard to learn on your own. I am the CAD leader for my team for 2 years now. When I first started in my sophomore year in the CAD team, I was told to just mess around and that is how I got a good feel for the program. I was also told different things that I should know and now I know CAD like the back of my hand. If you have any questions, please contact me.

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I have taught myself Inventor and SolidWorks and neither of them were very hard to learn.

One thing I will say is the tutorials built in are nice to learn the gist of what given tools do but it doesn't really teach you how to use them. The tutorials are sort of contrived and very simple. Earlier today i was trying to model and subsequently make a drawing of a crystal structure and Inventor was having some constraint issues (I think it may have been a geometry problem on Inventor's part) but real world applications will throw new curveballs at you that the tutorials don't.

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How did you leran it then? I need to learn CAD, but the tutorials don't see, to work for me either.

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I did the tutorials to learn the base fundamentals then pretty much came up with ideas and CADed them. Another option is grab something in the real world and a caliper and try to CAD it.

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I made the logo in Lego Digital Designer once :P

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I made our minibot prototype in LDD!

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cool! It is a useful program!