Working with the Frame Generator - Autodesk Inventor 2010: No Experience Required - page 248

Because you're entering new territory by using representations, let's take
some time to understand what representations can do.
FIGURE 5.35 The fan assembly with edits to the fan support frame completed
Representations
In the preceding exercise, you were asked to suppress a component in the assem-
bly for the sake of clarity. What if you turned off the visibility of several parts? You
may have noticed that turning off the component's visibility was also an option.
The result of using either is to no longer see the part — but to Inventor, these are
very different things. Maybe you'd like to do more than be able to make parts vis-
ible or invisible repeatedly. Perhaps viewing parts in a different color would help
clarity, but you only want to do it temporarily.
In Inventor, one of the least utilized tools in the assembly environment is the
representation , which you can use for these purposes and more. Some regard the
representation as a tool to be used for advanced purposes, but I consider it a