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Sunday, October 10, 2010

Naming Parameters in Autodesk Inventor

"You're never ready, you just run out of time."

With the Autodesk Manufacturing Academy looming close, these weeks blog is going to be quick and simple.

Many of us know that you can (and in some cases should), rename parameters inside of Autodesk Inventor. This makes the parameters easy to call back at a later time.  For example, it's much easier ot find a parameter named 'Length' opposed to trying to remember what parameter 'd89' represents.

Typically, you rename your parameters in the parameter screen of Inventor. 


A parameter renamed
But there is a quick way to rename them as your typing the parameter.  Just type "parameter = dx' when creating a dimension, and the parameter will rename at the time you're placing the dimension.

Renaming the Parameter

This renames the parameter all at once!  You don't need to go and open the parameters screen!

Verifying the renaming of the parameter

That's it!  A simple tip, but one I think is helpful!

More to come when AMA is done!

9 comments:

  1. Another good tip for calculation :
    http://www.nicolasbonniot.com/blog/visuels/maquette-numerique/comment-utiliser-les-fonction-ceil-et-floor-sur-des-dimensions/

    It is in French but easy to understand, it explains the use of ceil() and floor() with the very nice function isolate that remove the unit (avoid problem with rad and deg or others stange unit)
    Those functions are really usefull for the parameters using, specially to get rounded values

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  2. Good tip indeed.

    Thanks for sharing!

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  3. Anonymous1:39 PM

    Also a good tip, if you type in a parameter name in a dialog box it does the same thing as when typed in a sketched dimension. I can't tell you how much I love this ease of use of parametrics over the last couple releases.

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  4. Thanks for the tip, Mark. It is pretty cool what they've done with parameters lately, isn't it!

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  5. Anonymous1:14 AM

    Sorry for my bad english. Thank you so much for your good post. Your post helped me in my college assignment, If you can provide me more details please email me.

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  6. thanks so much for the awesome tip. Hey can anyone answer this question (or relate to another source). Renaming paramaters is very limiting in that spaces, dashes, etc are not allowed. So naming a parameter "Cross Tube-OD" has to become "CrossTubeOD" which is more likely to be confusing.
    Thanks in advance for suggestions

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  7. Spaces are considered "special characters", which aren't allowed. However, you could use; "Cross_tube_OD"

    That should get you where you need to be, without cramming the words together!

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  8. Aaron3:29 PM

    thanks, but I've tried that too. Maybe cause I'm using Inventor R10. But underscore gives the same error as spaces or dashes. It only accepts upper and lowercase letters and numbers

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  9. Aaron,

    My memory get's fuzzy going back that many versions, but I'm pretty sure it worked back then too.

    The only thing I can think of is make sure you're up to date on your hotfixes,service packs, etc.

    If you're on Vista or Win 7 that could explain it (R10 was never tested on those OS's). At least try turning off User Account Control.

    That causes all sorts of problems!

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