Vault Shortcuts in Inventor's Open window

When using Vault with Inventor, most people know they can open files directly from within the Vault, but one of the easiest ways to navigate to the data you need in Vault is to save a shortcut. Shortcuts can be created from the full Vault client, and then are directly accessible from the Open dialog box in Inventor. This is a great way to quickly locate files, jobs, or reference folders you are actively utilizing most often.

First create a shortcut in the full Vault client by using a right click or drag and drop on a file or folder you want a shortcut for:

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This will then take you directly to that file or folder in Vault:

In the Inventor Open from Vault dialog box, the shortcuts are listed on the left:

After being selected from the shortcut, the file can be immediately opened without further searching:

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Contributed by Ben of the CAD Geeks

Shortcut Organization in Vault

I have previously pointed out the benefits of using shortcuts in Vault to keep track of the active jobs or designs I am working on, but some Vault users have a lot of different common areas they access. If you have as many shorcuts on your desktop as me, you most likely could use some housekeeping on your Vault shortcuts as well. This can be accomplished by creating new Shortcut Groups in Vault as shown above. These are essentially like creating extra folders to sort your shortcuts and make it easier to get to just the right Vault location in a hurry.

Contributed by Ben of the INCAT CAD Geeks

Everyone Likes Shortcuts

You can use a little Windows technology and incorporate it into your Inventor workflows.....

I always like when I visit a customer and the manager comes over with his laptop and his entire desktop is covered with icons..."Shortcut to..". There are so many that it would seem confusing and time consuming to find the one you want. I got to thinking that maybe this could be applied to an engineer using Inventor and needing to access a file quickly.

There are a couple of different workflows that you could use to create a shortcut to a specific file that you are working on. Let's take a look at a few. In the video below, I'll show how you can use the Windows shortcut creator to browse and select a file as well as creating a shortcut directly on a specific file. And lastly, if you really want to send the shortcut to your desktop, you can do that as well....You just might want to do it sparingly!

WATCH VIDEO HERE

John with the INCAT CAD Geeks