I’m in the process of evaluating Inventor 9 to take the place of Mechanical Desktop 5, and fit somewhere below ProE in our office. Does anyone have any opinions on Inventor?
My experience so far has convinced me that Solidworks is a little easier to learn.
We use Inventor nearly exclusively in our R&D dept, unless some quick 2D stuff needs to be sorted out in AutoCad. I’ve found it much more intuitive than Mechanical Desktop or SolidWorks. But it’s definitely engineering biased software. It has limits when it comes to complex shapes and surfaces. Hopefully v. 9 has addressed some of those limits. We’re upgrading to 9 in a couple weeks. Maybe I’ll have more feedback for you then.