[deheer_j]

Our school teaches Inventor as part of the STEM curriculum, so the team has elected to use that as our CAD tool. Last year we used Creo and struggled mightily with the learning curve. However, Windchill was fantastic for model integrity and storage. My personal preference is SolidWorks (with GrabCAD), but I struggle with what is best for the students. Is it better to support/augment what the school is already teaching them or is it better to use a tool that people are actually using in the mechanical design world? Don't get me wrong, I am an inventor fan-boy, but my industry experience as an engineering consultant proves that, in general, large, established companies use Creo, smaller, younger comapnies use SolidWorks, and a very small handful use Inventor.

As a side note, GrabCAD's support of Inventor 2015 is abysmal. It's effectively no better than GIT or Dropbox, imho. Which is another reason to switch to solid works, unless Autodesk could make a cloud version of Vault available (like Windchill) [HINT HINT].

SO with all that said... I am not looking to start a war and I apologize if I hijacked this thread, but in the spirit of the OP's initial question, is it better to support and use a software that the school teaches or is it better to use a more widely used software on our team?

Thanks for reading!