Finding Your Way in the Inventor Interface - Autodesk Inventor 2010: No Experience Required - page 30

Make Yourself at Home:
Customizing Inventor
Now that you have a basic feel for some of the tools you'll use most frequently,
it's time for you to make yourself at home. You may have noticed that the back-
ground of the Design window changed colors in the previous images. I made this
change for clarity in the printed images; you can also make changes to tailor
Inventor to your needs. Inventor can be customized at several levels. In this sec-
tion, I'll detail a few of the options and even show you how to save the way
you've confi gured Inventor for future use.
Changing the coloring of Inventor's work environment and sketching elements
can make it easy to see what you're working on. Some users like to reposition or
resize the tools to give themselves more room to work or to make the tools eas-
ier to fi nd. You'll experiment with most of these settings once or twice, but when
you're comfortable you may not want to change them again.
Some of the options in these exercises are unique to assemblies and drawings
of assemblies, so they won't appear in Inventor LT.
Application Options
Let's start with the Application Options dialog box (Figure 1.24). This is the
central repository for your personal settings. These are the settings that control
how Inventor looks to you and what options you want to use. These tools don't
affect settings that are local to models and drawings. To access the Application
Options dialog box, choose the Tools tab, and select Application Options. Or,
pick the Options button at the bottom of the Applications Menu fl y-out.
Notice the Import and Export buttons at the bottom of the window. These two
tools allow you to save the settings that you prefer or even transfer them to other
users or other systems where you'll be using Inventor. Your settings are saved as
XML fi les.
The AutoCAD_Related_Options.xml fi le changes the Help system to AutoCAD-
related settings, reverses the mouse-wheel zoom direction, and changes the back-
ground to black. If you installed Inventor with AutoCAD preferences, you may have
some of the same settings already active. The Inventor_Default_Options.xml fi le
restores Inventor's default settings.
As with other dialog boxes, a Help button appears at lower left with specifi c
help for the tool you're working with. Clicking Help lists the specifi c portions of
the tab that you have active.