Autodesk Inventor – Migrating Styles, Templates and Libraries

It’s that time of the year again – the latest version of Inventor drops and we’re all itching to put it through it’s paces. Once you’ve determined that you’ll want to use the latest and greatest for your best and brightest work – you’ll need to migrate your custom Styles, Templates and Libraries. We’ve broken this down into 3 steps as seen below. Before taking the plunge, remember to take a backup of the following:

1. Your Design Data folder
2. Your Templates folder
3. Your custom Content Center libraries (*.idcl)

1 – Migrate Styles and Standards

If you’re using an “out-of-the-box” configuration, you can continue using the default Styles and Standards of the new version and skip this portion. However, if you’ve made customisations to your Styles and Standards, you’ll want to migrate your Design Data folder to the new version. Open the Project Manager [Inventor > Get Started tab > Projects]

• If [Default] is shown, hover over [Default] and it will show you the path to the Design Data folder.
• From Inventor 2019 onwards, the Presets folder contain the preset definitions for the Hole command.

Use the latest version of the Styles Library Manager [Windows Start > Autodesk Inventor 20xx > Style Library Manager 20xx] to migrate your Design Data.

2 – Migrate Templates

Rather than Open, Save and Close each template file, use Task Scheduler [Windows Start > Autodesk Inventor 20xx > Task Scheduler 20xx] to do the migration for you.

3 – Migrate Content Center Libraries

If you’ve created your own customised Content Center Libraries, this will need to be migrated as well. Did I mention this already?  Take a backup first!

Content Center libraries have the extension *.IDCL (e.g. My Library.idcl). The default location of the Content Center Libraries are in C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Inventor 20xx\Content Center\Libraries, so you may need to copy your custom IDCL file from the old location (Inventor 2018) to the new location (Inventor 2019).

What about my custom interface settings?

From Inventor 2019 onwards, go to [Inventor > Tools tab > Migrate Settings]

Interface customisations migrated:

• Ribbon customisation
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Marking menu customisations
• Appearance browser settings
• Mini toolbar settings

Application Options migrated:

• Appearance settings
• File locations
• Other settings

Thats it! Three easy steps, and you’re good to go. You can download these steps from the PDF – Autodesk Inventor – Migration Steps

If you’re still using your Default.ipj project file – have a look at this blog post showing you how to create your own IPJ file: Creating your own Inventor Project File