Finding Your Way in the Inventor Interface - Autodesk Inventor 2010: No Experience Required - page 42

The Project File editor is a fairly simple tool. It has a list of project fi les that
have been used at the top in the Select Project pane, a display of the paths and
properties of the highlighted project fi le in the bottom in the Edit Project pane,
and a handful of tools on the right for modifying the project fi le. You must fol-
low a few rules for project fi les:

You can't change the active project fi le when a fi le is open.

You can't add a Frequently Used Subfolders shortcut to a folder that

isn't “under” the location of the project fi le.

To edit a project fi le, you must have read/write access to the fi le or to

the folder it's in.

As you select different options, the buttons on the right change to show that
they are available or unavailable. As you read through the descriptions of what
the sections of the project fi le do, try selecting them, and note which buttons
become available. As you explore, continue to use the Samples.ipj project fi le
that you made active previously. Here are some of the elements of the project fi le:

Type You'll work with two primary types of project fi le. The Type option allows
you to select between them:

Single User For the stand-alone user who won't be sharing data
with other users simultaneously.

Vault Only available if you've installed the Vault, Autodesk's file-
management tool that comes with Inventor. It enables simultaneous
sharing with multiple users.

NOTE Two other types of project file let multiple users access data —
but I can't recommend strongly enough that you use the Vault if you intend to
share data in a network environment. The Vault is free and provides addi-
tional tools to make your work easier.

Location This setting tells Inventor where the fi le is installed and also estab-
lishes a relative path that other search paths use to shorten their own searches
for fi les. The project fi le may be in C:\Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk\
Inventor 2010\Samples\ , but during its search Inventor will skip all the previ-
ous directories and begin searching for fi les under the \Samples folder. This
may not seem important, but it can greatly improve performance.