[sanddrag]

I started my adventures in CAD with Inventor 5 (love it, runs great on old hardware), and stuck with it through 8, 10, and 2010 which I still use. I suppose this year I'll be making the move to Inventor 2012 for FRC, although I'll still be using 2010 in the classes I teach. I took a brief break from Inventor while in college during which time I used Solidworks 2004, 2007, and 2008. I found Solidworks 2008 to be very slow running. However, during that time I regarded SolidWorks as being a much better program than Inventor, especially on the drawing side of things.

These days, I stick with Inventor simply for the reason that my school has a license, it's easy to get for home use, easy to learn, and it has a lot of educational ties. Also, it works well for my purposes. The downside? Hardly anyone in industry has ever heard of it. :-(

A year ago when I had a set of very old computers I needed CAD on, I investigated ProE and started going through their self-study certification training. I found certain tasks which are natural and very simple in SolidWorks or Inventor to just be atrocious in ProE, and quickly gave it up. I found its interface and work-flow to be rather archaic.