[Dan Zollman]

Originally Posted by Gherkinman

I was just intoduced to Inventor 10 in October last year and I have never used AutoCAD or any other CAD software.

I imagine that Inventor is the most "user-friendly" as was stated above, most of what I know I had to teach myself. Being a teenager I did not refer to any of those lame tutorials It went pretty well and I know enough to cheat the program into doing what I want it to most of the time.

However, I have noticed that Inventor doesn't like it when you organize your work into sub-folders. I like to keep my computers organized but inventor has trouble finding the path names when i put parts in subfolders. This leads to many whiny pop-ups demanding pathnames whenever I try to open my project and seems like an oversight on the designer's part : /

Another problem I noticed was the frequent errors and long pauses as the program does god knows what after I tell it to perform simple funtions like contraining two objects.

I have to disagree with most of this. If you aren't willing to spend time learning the software--if you don't want to use tutorials, "figuring out" how to use it isn't going to work well--you can't judge whether Inventor is a good program.

You certainly don't need to cheat the program into doing anything in order to do what you want. If you get frequent errors, you either have a bad installation, the computer is incompatible with the software, or you're doing things wrong. I can do anything I want with Inventor and I see an error a couple times a month.

Inventor doesn't know how to constrain objects all by itself. You have to know how to properly constain parts. When you understand constraints and degrees of freedom and you do it correctly, it works smoothly and correctly.

The software is set up to handle the use of subfolders. Once parts are added to assemblies, the Design Assistant can be used to change file paths and you won't get errors.

Basically, I can't imagine anything being "worse" than inventor. Alas, thats what they give us and I don't have a couple grand lying around to invest in a professional CAD program.

Inventor is a professional CAD program.

MSPaint is "worse" than Inventor, but you don't need any tutorials in order to use it.