Inventor Basics Series—Taking Control of Your Styles and Standards

CHRIS BENNER: Got just about a minute here before they close the doors. So I just want to ask, everybody's using Inventor already in the room? Yes? What kind of releases are we looking at? Who's on 2018?

OK. '17? '16? Anybody lower than 16? Well, the styles and standards hasn't changed in about 20 years. So there's-- no matter what release you're on, you should be good. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

All right, they should be closing the doors any minute. We're going to start. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to AU. First class, first day. Nobody's awake. I know I'm not.

Welcome to Controlling your Styles and Standards. I am Chris, and that is Mark, and today we are going to talk about making anything.

We're going to talk about controlling styles and standards in the Inventor environment. The styles and standards are there to give you complete control over how your documents look. And when I say "documents", I'm talking everything. Parts, assemblies, drawings.

We are going to focus on the drawing styles in this class, because that's where the bulk of what you're going to be doing is going to be found. So we're going to show you some tips and tricks of how to get around in the environment, how to create and edit your own styles, and then how to avoid some of the pitfalls.

If I get that to work. All right. When the class is over, we're hoping that you're going to know how to find and understand the styles that are in your files, how to edit existing styles, and create new ones. We're going to have-- actually, Mark is going to talk a little bit about style libraries and style conflicts, and how to avoid those.

A little bit about myself. I am Chris Benner. I'm the CAD Manager at Powell Fabrication in Michigan. We manufacture chemical processing equipment. I am an Autodesk Expert Elite, and I get involved in all kinds of social media, and blogging and stuff.

If anyone has ever taken one of my classes before, you know this used to be a Lions helmet. I've kind of given up on the Lions for now. And since my daughter is currently going to Michigan, Go Blue for at least this one year.

I'm also a part-time photographer. I play around with cameras in my spare time, when I actually have some spare time. That's home. That's my front yard. I Live in Sanford, Michigan, and it's a beautiful place to live.

Powell manufactures skid-mounted chemical processing equipment centered around the chloralkali industry. So we do a lot of tube and pipe frame generator kind of stuff, and some big skids, some small skids. All different kinds of sizes. And with that, I'm going to let Mark introduce himself.

MARK LANCASTER: Morning, everyone. Before I get started, I've known Chris for a few years. I have to say that as long as I know him, he tries to really go knee-deep in his bio and talk a lot about [INAUDIBLE] style. Himself--

CHRIS BENNER: What he's saying is I talk too much.

MARK LANCASTER: Yeah. He talks too much stuff. So I'm going to keep it simple. I am a product support specialist for an Autodesk reseller located in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. I support all the common manufacturing Autodesk products like Inventor, AutoCAD, AutoCAD mechanical, and so on. I'm also a Vault support person and I do implementations and training for Vault. And I also get into licensing and subscription, so if you have any questions, you can ask me and hopefully I can answer them. With that I'm going to turn it back over to Chris.

CHRIS BENNER: All right, so what are styles? Anybody ever have that suit? C'mon, raise your hand. Who had that suit? Who had that haircut?

MARK LANCASTER: Nobody wants to admit.

CHRIS BENNER: Nobody wants to own up to that. Your styles in Inventor are a collection of settings and controls that change or affect the appearance of your documents, and you have a lot of control over this. Standards are in there as a collection of styles so you can create a standard and then populate it with a bunch of different styles. These are all stored in your design data folder as .XML files, but we warn you, do not attempt to edit those .XML files. Just don't do it. Don't even try.

Do all of your work through the Styles editor inside of Inventor. It's very easy to learn. There's a lot in it. It's got a lot of power and you won't mess things up with style. You can put these in your templates and then share them out to all the people that are using that template. Or you can create style libraries and set those up in your projects. Mark is going to cover that in a little bit more detail later.

Where they are found, you do have to have a document open because they're context sensitive. If you're in a part environment you're going to get a different screen than if you're in a drawing environment. So you have to have at least some sort of a file open and then you go to your manage tab and the Styles editor is right there in the middle. The big bold icon there. Easy to find. Easy to get to. This is what you're going to see when you open the Styles editor in a drawing environment. This is the out of the box. I haven't changed anything on this screen yet.

So the very first time you open it up this is what you're going to see. At the very top, you've got your standards. So you can have as many of those as you would like. And then under the standards are all of the different individual styles. And under each one of those tabs, as you can see with the dimensions tab that is being opened, there are several dimension styles. So you can have styles within your categories, you can have sub-styles within the styles. I don't have one of those open on the screen, but in some of the styles you'll see that there are sub-styles on the right screen that you can go even deeper into making changes to these things.

This is what you would see in the Styles editor if you're in a part or an assembly. You can control things like your lighting environments and the backgrounds, the expo- the screen. You can do rotations on your background screens. This is for if you're going to be playing around with any of the IDL environments. We're not going to cover a lot of that because, frankly, not too many people use it.

OK. We're going to look at the style library and I'm going to let Mark deal with that later, but we're going to show you how to create style libraries and how to control them, how to manage them, and how to avoid conflicts with those styles. All right, just a quick shot of what the style Library Manager looks like. I'm not going to go into that, I don't want to steal Mark's thunder. And here is your project editor, where you would tell the project what style libraries to use. And the key on that one is this- use style library read write. You have to have that set or it can't use the style libraries. Jump in if I'm not getting anything that you wanted me to cover.

We're going to spend a lot less time on slides today, and a lot more time in the software. So I'm going to jump right into Inventor and walk through the Styles editor. So bear with me while I switch screens here. So this is Inventor 2018 and I'm going to open up a template so that I've got a file open. And I'm going to modify this template because I'm a CAD manager here. And I'm going to make some changes to some of the styles so that my minion over here, when he creates a drawing, can have the latest styles that I've decreed.

MARK LANCASTER: As a reminder, our CAD manager has no style.

CHRIS BENNER: Excuse me! CAD managers have all of the style. So get my template drawing opened up here. And this is just your standard out of the box drawing template. And change this in any way, shape or form. So you go to the managed tab and in a great big box here is your styles editor. And again, this is just directly out of the box. There has been no changes made to these styles at all yet.

Up at the top you have your standards. You can see there's only one standard in here at the moment. But if you look at the filter on the upper right you can view either your active standard, any local styles that exist in this document, and that should still only show one, or you can view all styles. So this is going to pull from your design data folder any style that's in there. And you'll see the list got a lot larger. So this gives you a lot more starting points if you're going to create your own standards. You can use any one of these as a starting point.

If you wanted to create a new [INAUDIBLE] standard, you could pick this one and then right click a new style. And it'll create a copy of that style or that standard and like you start editing it to whatever you want to do with it. We're going to stick with the ANSI one today. So I'm going to go back to local styles. So I want my minions to all use the ANSI standards in their drawings.

Now, in the standard itself there are several tabs of settings that you can mess around with. You can set your units. You can set line weights for your layers. You can change how your decimal marker appears depending on where you are in the world. You can exclude characters from your view labels. There are some places that do not like to use certain characters in view labels. You can change how your view names appear. You can set view preferences for when a new view is created in your drawings. You can change how you want your threaded holes to look. Look in different views and change from first to third angle projection. Change the way your view labels are displayed.

You can also tell this particular standard which styles you want available to it. So, for example, in this standard, under balloons there's only one balloon style that's available to this ANSI standard. If I wanted to expand that I would go back to all styles, save my changes, and now I can tell this ANSI standard that I want it to include a couple more balloons styles, so I've got more choices to work with when I'm customizing. The more you select, the more options you'll have, but it also clutters up your screen a little bit. So find a balance in there and do it with style. Same thing with all of these others you can choose as many of these to be available to that standard as you want.

There's a lot of them in the dimensions. Now, this screen, I'm going to go back to in a few minutes. The object defaults is the key to this whole thing. This is where you tell your standard-- you've gone through and you've made changes to your styles, you've created new styles-- but you haven't applied them to anything yet. You're going to use this object default screen to apply those changed styles to your standard. So it knows when you place a dimension, use this style. Just because you've created it doesn't mean it knows to use it. So we'll go back to that one in a few minutes. And you can also change what is controlling your hash patterns. That's just on the standard itself.

Underneath the standard, you've also got all these different styles that are available to you and you can make changes to any of these as much as you would like to. I'm going to save my edits. On each one of these styles, there's going to be several settings-- maybe even several pages of settings-- that you can modify or set the way you want them. There are some styles here-- in the balloon style, you can jump to the leader style and make changes to that. You can jump to the text style and change that, and then jump back to the balloon style to finish your changes. Center marks, several settings in here for your lines, dimensions is a big one. There's a lot of these available to you. And in every one of these, there's going to be several tabs.

So some of the styles have even more settings to think about. And you can drill these down as deep as you want to go-- and customize exactly what you want to customize-- so that when you're done, your document looks exactly the way your company standards want it to look. And if you're the CAD manager, that means you get to decide what his drawings are going to look like. So that gives you a little bit of power. Just remember, do it with style.

So in your menus here-- when you right click-- you can set a standard or style as active, you can create a new one. You can rename them. If this was highlighted, you could purge unused styles. But since this is my active style, it's not going to let me purge it. You can export a style. It'll save it out into a file system as a .styxml, isn't it?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

CHRIS BENNER: And that's a file that you could then share with other people. It's for one specific style. If you've got something that you're going to set up, and you want to share it with somebody-- maybe in another building or another end of the building-- Yes.

AUDIENCE: As a CAD manager, is that how you would ensure that your team members are using the correct style?

CHRIS BENNER: The export? No, I would set them up in the template, so that when they open up the template to begin a new drawing, everything is already set. And Mark's going to also talk about style libraries, which you do through your projects. So that's another way that I would do it. But in my company we do it through the templates. This is just for maybe a temporary-type of situation, where I've got something very specific I want to use on a drawing or two, and I want to be able to share it with someone. I'll throw that out into a shared drive. And when those rare occasions come up that I need that, we'll pull it into the drawing and use it. But it's not an everyday thing. Here's where you could save that to one of your style libraries.

What was I going to do? I'm going to actually create a new standard. That is what I want to do. So I'm going to start with the ANSI standard. And I'm going to select New. And notice it's going to come up. It is going to grab that name and use Copy Of. At that point, you can rename it anything you want to name it, as long as you can remember what you named it. And I'm going to just call this Au2017 Default ANSI standard. So that will make it different from the one that's in there.

Right now, all the settings are exactly the same as the default ANSI, so I can go in and start changing things. I am going to change this just a little bit. I'm going to set-- I don't want to show the scale on my view. So I'm going to backspace out of this. And I'm going to show just the View label itself. I don't want to show the scale. So I put my views to scale. I don't want my user over here putting his views to scale. And I'm going to limit the number of available styles that he has. We'll use the Fraction. We'll take out the Millimeters. And we'll take out the Architectural. So he's limited now to Default ANSI and Default Fraction in his dimensions. And we'll leave the hash patterns alone for him. So we're going to go ahead and save that new standard.

But now I want to make some changes to some styles that I'm going to apply to that standard. So I'm going to give him some options in the Balloons. I'm going to create a new Balloon standard or style. New style, and we'll call this one Au2017 as well. Don't backspace here. [INAUDIBLE] everything. Add To Standard, we'll leave that checked. So now that will be in, if I go to my Standard and go to Available Styles, that new style is going to be in the available list. Where did it go? Balloons, I'm looking right at it and not seeing it. There it is. Au2017 Balloons is now available to this Standard.

So in that Au2017 Balloons-- I want to make some changes so that I can tell him what to do. I am going to change the property that is displayed in the balloon from the item number. We're going to take Item out. And we're going to force that Balloon to show Quantity and Part Number. This gives you a list of available properties. I'm going to choose Part Number and Quantity. Move that one up. And then I'm going to tell it that I want to use the Split Balloon. So now I will get a split balloon that's got the part number on the top and the quantity on the bottom whenever I balloon my parts. He may not like it, I don't care. I'm the CAD manager. He's got to do what I tell him to do.

So we're also going to change our Center Mark. So I'm going to create a new one. Yes, I want to save my changes to that one. I'm going to create a new Center Mark. And we'll rename this sucker. You can see there is a lot in here. I could spend all day playing around in this screen and show you every single setting, but we'd be here until Thursday. So I'm just going to give you some quick examples.

What I recommend to everybody is, when you get home, if you want to play around with these-- create a dummy drawing and just start changing things and drop stuff on to your screen. Create some views, put in some text, put in some notes and dimensions. See what it looks like. Tweak it a little bit, play around with it until you're happy with it. And then do it in your templates. So you're not messing anything up. You've got a lot of power with this.

So now I've created my new Au2017 Center Mark. And we're going to change this A dimension-- make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to save that. And I'm also going to change the notes. Where is my Note Text? There we go, Note Text. I'm going to make a few changes in here-- in Style. Au2017 again. And I'm going to change the justification. I want everything center-justified on this. I don't want to mess around with anything being left-justified. And we're going to change my text size 0.125. All right so that's all the changes I'm going to make to the notes.

And now I'm going to make a change to his dimension style. I've got notes over here because I forget stuff. Default ANSI-- We're going to create a new style based on that. I could edit the Defaults as well. But I always like to make copies of everything, so that the defaults are still intact to use as a starting point.

In my new dimension style, I'm going to change the units to-- well, we'll put that on feet. We'll give him feet and inches-- how's that sound? And we'll set up alternate units to appear underneath. And then we'll give them a default tolerance. He's not going to like this, but I don't care. I'm just mean.

MARK LANCASTER: As normal.

CHRIS BENNER: What?

MARK LANCASTER: As normal.

CHRIS BENNER: As normal. And we'll just set the upper and lower to 0.001. So I've just created a bunch of new styles. But they are not assigned to anything yet. So when I was talking earlier about this object defaults-- this is where I'm going to tell my standard which styles to use. And you find that right here in the Object Defaults. Open that up. I can expand it. And I need to choose what object defaults I want to modify. So I'm going to use Object Defaults, ANSI.

And you'll see there is a huge list of object types. These are all of the objects that are available to you in the drawing environment. And you can set each one of these to use a specific style. In your Dimensions alone, there are probably a dozen of them in here. And you can tell each type of dimension to use a different style, if you want. So if you want your linear dimensions to be one style, and your radius dimensions to be a different style-- you've got that flexibility built-in here. So for everything you need to set-- I just made changes to the dimensions, so I need tell my linear dimensions now, to use-- instead of Default ANSI-- I grab the pull-down. And I'm going to tell it to use Au2017 Default. That's the new one that I just created.

Now one of the biggest questions that I always get on the forums is, I just created all these new styles. Why aren't they showing up in my drawings. This is why. Because people often don't know about the Object Defaults step. They think, OK, I've created a style, it should just be there. Well, there's so many of them that you have to tell your entities what style to use. It's a little bit of work upfront, but you'll be glad you did it in the long run. When you go through and set all these, then your template is set. Somebody uses that template in their drawing-- they shouldn't have to change a thing. Everything is right there, already preset for them. And their drawings will appear exactly the way you, as the CAD manager, want them to appear. So that is Object Defaults. There is a lot in here.

I'm going to change one more-- balloons. I want to tell my standard to use my new Au2017 Balloons. So then I'm going to save and close. And now this template has all of the changes that I just made available to it. And now Mark will be able to use this template to create his new drawings. And I'll be a happy CAD manager, because everything is set the way that I have decreed it.

I think that's all I was going to show for this part of it, and then I'm going to let you take over. So go back to here. And we're going to let Mark take over.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- What a minute, Doc. Are you telling me you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?

- The way I see it-- if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?

[END PLAYBACK]

CHRIS BENNER: Anything you do in life, do it with style.

MARK LANCASTER: Thanks, Chris. So my CAD manager has informed me that we have a new drawing template to use, which is probably not good.

CHRIS BENNER: Ah, you'll like it. You'll love it. I made some good changes.

MARK LANCASTER: So I'm going to start a new drawing here. And I'm going to pick this new template that they want me to use. Again, forcing me to do something.

CHRIS BENNER: Oh, come on.

MARK LANCASTER: Ah, Chris, what did you do?

CHRIS BENNER: I gave you new template. What's wrong with it?

MARK LANCASTER: Well, look at the message. I get a Styles conflict.

CHRIS BENNER: That's your problem.

MARK LANCASTER: Really?

CHRIS BENNER: Yeah. I'm a CAD manager. That's not my problem.

MARK LANCASTER: All right, so this kind of leads us into the Styles Conflict message.

CHRIS BENNER: I'm sure everyone in this room has seen that.

MARK LANCASTER: How many have seen this message? Hopefully, the whole entire room. How many in your organization? Maybe only certain users-- Maybe you haven't seen it but somebody else. How many find it's hard to resolve? It keeps popping up.

CHRIS BENNER: How many hear from the cubicle next door-- What the heck is this?

MARK LANCASTER: And be honest about this-- how many have ignored it or suppressed the message? Or perhaps you may feel like this.

[LAUGHING]

CHRIS BENNER: Everybody recognizes this video. I've been there a few times.

MARK LANCASTER: How many feel like that when the Styles Conflict message keeps coming up? All right, so what led us here? Chris has already kind of talked about this, but when we install Inventor on our machines, we get Styles added to our installation. There's a default location. It's designated as the Inventor Design Data folder or your Global Styles. There is many terminology-- Styles Library, Styles Library Definition, Master Styles-- whatever you want to call it.

As Chris pointed out, when he opened up the Styles editor, he's showing you all the styles that are there. If you go out to your designated Design Data folder using Windows Explorer-- as Chris pointed out, they are in XML format-- you can see the relationship. So there is a Balloon XML. It's related to the balloon style. There is one for Leader, Center Lines, Notes and those type of things. So at this point, I'm just going to call it the Styles library. It's anything that's in that Inventor Design Data folder-- wherever you put it.

When we go to edit a style-- like Chris did in the template-- he's making that local change. Remember he toggled the show. He said, what's Local Styles and what's All Styles? When he's doing All Styles, it's looking at the Local Styles that in your template, and also that's out in the Inventor Design Data folder. The one he made the change-- he's only making it locally in that template or whatever file that you are modifying it. There is no impact to the Inventor Design Data folder. We haven't changed anything in there.

So when we start a new drawing, Inventor goes out and compares what's local to that global styles. Guess what happens when they don't match? So if Chris modified Balloon ANSI locally, but Balloon ANSI was also global styles-- that they don't match-- guess what appears? The styles conflict message.

How many find this message a little cryptic-- you don't really know how to troubleshoot this? Does it lead to frustrations, like I asked before? I know, years ago when I started Inventor, I felt like the guy that wanted to throw my computer out the window. And like I said, which leads us to ignoring it, suppressing it. There's a lot of times people on the forum says, well I've done this, but I don't see my styles. And the first question I always ask-- did you suppress that message? Yeah. Well that's why. You're bypassing this message. You need to fully understand what's going on.

The only thing I don't like-- there's a lot of things I don't like about this message-- but there's only one way out. And what is it? It's the OK button. There's no other options given to except the prompt to ignore it or suppress it.

All right, so let's break down this message. It's actually in two parts. The first part is telling me what's going on. It's telling me that you have a styles conflict. And it tells you that because you're using this template, those styles conflict what's in the global styles. So it says, when you hit the OK, guess what's going to be used. The assumption is always the global styles, or what's in that Inventor Design Data folder.

CHRIS BENNER: So all the changes that I just made in the styles in that template--

MARK LANCASTER: When I hit OK--

CHRIS BENNER: When you hit OK, they're gone, and it goes back out to the Global Styles library and pulls in those definitions.

MARK LANCASTER: What leads to a lot of the confusion is, you swear up and down, I know I changed those styles. Why don't they appear in my new drawing? So you go back to the template and say, I got to do this again. And you open up the template and guess what? They're there, right. All those changes you made are still there. So you keep asking, why is this happening? They are in my template but they don't appear. Because the only option in that message when you hit OK gets overwritten what's in the Global Styles.

So let's talk about that. When we start a new drawing-- like I said it does that comparison-- when we open existing drawings or a template, Inventor doesn't do any comparison. That's why when you directly open up your template, you never see the Styles Conflict message. But when you use the template that's when you see it.

So now we know why the Styles Conflict message appears. Everybody kind of understand how that's happening now? I will tell you, I'm not a fan of that message. I never have been. Because it assumes that I always want to use my global styles. Well Chris says, hey, I want to change the locally. I don't care what's out my Design Data folder. So I want to use those styles. Well that message always assumes Global Styles is the controlling factor. Now in some cases, that's true. But in other cases, it's not. So like I said, I'm not a fan of that message.

So there's another part to this message or the second half, which is broken up into two solutions. Solution number one says, well, if you want the Styles Library definition, you're going to update your template. So does anybody know what that first solution is telling you? It's telling you the same thing as the OK button. It's doing the same thing. So like I said, if you want the Styles Library-- which is out on our designated Design Data folder-- you go to update. Well how do you update? Well, you open up the template. And as Chris pointed out, some of the functions there under that Manage tab-- you select the Update button. When you do that, you get the dialog. And guess what? It's the same Styles that I got the Styles Conflict message. It's showing those same styles. When you look at that message, there's a couple of things. The location-- so the location is telling you, well, it's in both-- meaning that same name style is not only in my template, it's also in my Inventor Design Data folder. It also indicates where the change occurs. So as Chris made that change to that template-- you can see the Balloon ANSI, Center Mark-- those have all been changed locally. That's where the changes occur. As I indicated before, we never touch the Global or the Inventor Design Data folder.

So as I indicated, this solution is the same thing as the OK button. So ask yourself-- if somebody tells you to solve the Styles Conflict message and hit the OK button-- ask yourself, do I really want to do that? Because it's the same thing. Why do I want to do the same thing that the Styles Conflict message told me to, when what I want to use my Local Styles? So solution number one, to me, is not a solution.

CHRIS BENNER: Solution number one basically undoes everything I just did.

MARK LANCASTER: Right. Yes. So solution number two-- maybe we'll get a solution out of this. If you want your template styles-- hey that's what we want. That's what we're here. Chris made the changes to the template. We want to use those styles. It tells me to remove the Global Styles using the Styles Library Manager. Maybe we're getting somewhere. So Chris already pointed out, but I just want to reinforce it. How many know actually know about the Styles Library Manager in Inventor? Quite a few. So basically, what it is, or where it's located in your Windows Start button. There's nothing inside of Inventor will get you there. It's a separate application outside. Based on your operating system-- I think Windows 7, it's buried under the Tools subsection. I think Windows 10, it's up with Inventor. So if you need to use it, it's out on the Start menu.

And what is it? The Styles Library Manager fills two things. One is a migration tool. And we're going to talk more a little bit about it later on-- migration. And also a management tool. So how you can manage your styles. And I've got a couple of demos related to this.

The other thing that points out-- how many are in a mixed Inventor environment-- where you have different versions of Inventor on your machines? All right, just keep in mind when you're working with Styles-- or the Styles Library Manager-- you have to use the same version. So if you're working in Inventor 2017, you have to use the Library Manager for 2017. So instead of demo, this is just a real quick-- it's just a video that I did showing you the steps how to go through. It tells me the solution, if you use the Styles Library Manager, to delete those Global Styles.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- In this quick video, I want to demonstrate how you can delete Styles within your Global Style information. I have already launched the Styles Library Manager for the Inventor version that I'm currently working on. My first step is to make sure the information sitting under the Style Library is pointing to the information related to the version I'm using. So I can either open or I can select it from the list.

MARK LANCASTER: So basically, you're pointing to the Inventor Design Data folder.

- --information display. The next thing you want to do is Show All Styles. From there, you want to pick the style that you will be deleting. So in our case, we are going to delete styles related to balloon. So I'm going to pick from the type, and then go to the style listed under the column for Styles Library 1, right mouse-click, and hit delete. When this occurs, you may receive a message like this.

[END PLAYBACK]

MARK LANCASTER: I didn't think my video was that great but I get a--

CHRIS BENNER: Yeah they love it next door.

MARK LANCASTER: I'm getting applause for it.

CHRIS BENNER: They love it next door. Did your video end?

MARK LANCASTER: All right. What happened to my clicker? There we go. A couple of things that I want to point out, solution number two is providing you a solution, but they don't tell you some crucial things. How many when they install Inventor-- whatever version that they're on-- have backed up the Inventor Design Data folder? Everybody in here needs to be raising their hand. Maybe you don't have control over that. But your organization has to be doing this. As soon as you install it on one machine, you need to back up your Inventor Design Data folder.

The reason behind this-- when you go to delete these styles-- guess what? There's no undo button. And I've been on a few help desk cases where people have gone down-- they've corrupted their Inventor Design Data folder. And they have nowhere to go back. I mean, we end up founding in another machine. But the crucial thing-- any time you're dealing with Inventor Design Data folder or styles-- whether it's parts, assemblies, drawings-- you need to be backing it up before you do anything.

The other thing is, when you go to delete your Global Styles-- like Chris has already had those templates, a balloon ANSI, those type of things-- there is a relationship between that Local Style and Global Styles. When you delete its relationship to that Global Styles, they all become local inside the template and will never update again. So you have to think about this. If I delete from my Inventor Design Data folder, I can impact every drawing, or every part, or every assembly that I've made out there.

Now in most cases-- the reason I put that clause that you may see this-- when you start dealing with the out-of-the-box Design Data folder, you are always going to see this message. You have to think about the styles that are created. There is parent and child relationship. So when I want to go delete that balloon ANSI, it's just not that style. It has parents. And those children have parents. In order to get rid of balloon ANSI, guess what I have to do. I have to go through each one of those styles and delete them, because there is a relationship. I can't delete something that has a parent to it.

So ask yourself, do you really want to do that? I mean, you can do that. I'm not a fan of that. I do not want to destroy all this parent-to-child relationship that's out there. So to me, here's my second solution. It's not a solution for me. But like I said, you can go down that road if you want to. Now the message doesn't indicate it. Do you know there's actually truth for each solutions for resolving the Styles Conflict message, and it will come back again?

Option number one is called the save back. And we are going to talk about that here in a second. Option number two is you make your own styles. This is my preferred method. And I'm going to walk through a live demo of doing that. And option number three is to create a blank Master Styles Library. How many know that you can create a blank Master Styles Library?

So option number one is called the save back. Basically, we're going to use our template to create a new global standard. So we can take the information that Chris did in his template, and save it back. And now the Global Styles and my Local Styles that are in my template are saved. There is no styles conflict anymore. So basically when we open up our template, we're going to go hit the Save button. How many of us have seen that says my Save button is disabled-- it's grayed out?

CHRIS BENNER: Yours is grayed out.

MARK LANCASTER: Yeah I know. I'm just-- The reason is-- and Chris kind of pointed out-- it's disabled based on the status in the active event or project file. If it's set to Read Only, the Save button is disabled. If it's set to Read/Write, then it is set to save where it allows the user to push back down to the Global Styles. Now I tell everybody when I get into the Styles-- what's the first thing you do before you start changing that Event or Design Data folder? Back it up.

Now, I'm not sure in your organization if everybody has the ability to save back. But if you allow everybody-- so in your project file, it says, yeah I want everybody to have the ability to save back, and I will set it to Read/Write. If you allow people to do that, and people are not careful they hit that Save, you're going to be constantly in the loop of Styles conflict. So what I tell everybody is limit two to four people in your organization to that Read/Write aspect. And lock everybody else out. And it will help you reduce the number of styles conflicts that you get.

Another thing I want to point out-- because we are going to talk about migration at the end-- if you modify your Global Styles and populate it with the styles that you like, when you're updating to the NICs Inventor version, you have to go through a migration process of that style. We're going to talk more about that. But I just wanted to point that out.

Option number two is my preferred method. This is how I work. But there is no ground rule saying that you have to do it my way or any of these options. You have to figure out which is going to work for your organization.

CHRIS BENNER: That's because you're not the CAD manager. You can't say, do it my way. My way or the highway.

MARK LANCASTER: I don't know if you've noticed who I am, but I started out many, many years ago as a board drafter. So I'm still the type of person, and I'm going to sit down and say, OK, what does my organization need for styles? I'll write them down. Yeah we need to modify the balloon. We need to modify the center line, those type of things. So I jot down what styles that I need for my organization.

Because we're modifying the local styles, there is no comparison going on. When it comes time to migrate, guess what I have to do. Because it's a Local Style, all I have to do is open up the template, save it to the NICs Inventor version, and I'm ready to go. I don't have to migrate any of my styles because they are all local.

Before we get there, how many find the Styles Library Editor is a little, it's not user friendly? I fully agree with you-- I should've said that. But to break this down, it's into three sections. And Chris has already talked about this. So that yellow highlighted section, which is the very top, that's the governing overall standard. To break it down, NICs-- it's the Objects Default. As Chris pointed out, you see people on the forums says I created my template, I created these styles-- how come when I do a dimension, those styles are not there? Because it is crucial, the Objects Default.

So the third level is the red section, or your Drawing Annotations. I wish this dialogue was broken out into those three sections-- Standard Indented, Objects Default, Indented, and then all your drawing annotations like that. If you understand how that flow is, it makes this interface a little bit more user-friendly.

This is the way I work. Like I said, there is no established rules. You can do whatever you want. I'm just pointing out. Chris showed you a way how he did it. I'm going to do kind of the reverse-order of what he did. Like I said, I'm an old-timer, I came from board drafting. I still write things down. I may look at the Excel spreadsheet and say hey, this is the styles that we need.

Step two, I started the common styles. So when are you going to see me do the demo, I'm going actually start it Note Text ANSI. You may say, why are you starting way at the bottom of this when you need balloons? Wouldn't you start with that? Think about the parent-to-child relationship. What is the most common style that's used in other styles? The Notes section. So I modify Common, which is my note. I go to leader. Probably after that, there is really no-- Then I start building all my other styles from there. Then I go do my Objects Default. And you are going to see me, I'm just going to place a placeholder there. Then I'm going to go to my upper standard, finish that, tell it to use the object's default. And then I come back and finish up with object default. You might say, that's a little odd workflow. But as you're going to see when I do this, how I find it much easier to work with.

So like I said, I'm going to define the object default. I'm going to come back later, define my standard, and then go back and revisit the object's default. And with that, I'm going to do my quick demo of that.

So I'm going to directly open up my template.

CHRIS BENNER: Workspace.

MARK LANCASTER: Yeah, I know.

CHRIS BENNER: I moved the template down. CAD managers love to do that.