Learning the File Types in Inventor

In AutoCAD, you might be accustomed to having the DWG (.dwg) file format as your primary file format; in Microsoft Word you will use primarily just a DOC (.doc) file; and in Microsoft Excel, you will use the XLS (.xls) file type for most of the work you do. All three of these commonly used programs use a single primary file type throughout. Inventor, on the other hand, follows the structure common to most other 3D modelers in the engineering field today and uses different file types for different tasks.

Why So Many File Types?

The purpose of using multiple file types is so the data load is distributed into many different files instead of having all information in one file. For instance, you use an IPT (.ipt ...

Get Mastering Autodesk® Inventor® 2012 and Autodesk® Inventor LT™ 2012 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.