You know the feeling. The model is finished, the drawing checks out, the design is done, and only then does the real work begin. Exporting, building the BOM, filling in metadata, getting files ready for production. None of it takes any thought, but it does take clicking, waiting and clicking again. By the end of the week you have easily lost half a day to tasks that add nothing to your design.
This article is about working faster in Inventor without having to change the way you work. We walk through five concrete time-wasters that every design engineer recognizes, and for each one we show which Thundercad tool takes the work off your hands. No vague promises: just the task you do now, and the button that replaces it.
Time-waster 1: manually exporting to PDF, DWG, DXF and STEP
An assembly with fifty drawings is finished. Production wants PDFs, the sheet-metal shop wants DXFs, your supplier wants STEP files and the archive wants DWG. So you open drawing after drawing, choose File > Export, set the format, navigate to the right folder, check the file name and confirm. For one drawing that takes a minute. For fifty drawings in four formats it takes a big chunk of your afternoon, and the chance that one slips through or ends up in the wrong folder grows with every click.
This manual exporting is the biggest, most insidious time-waster in many engineering departments. Not because it is hard, but because it comes back so often and demands your full attention while giving you nothing in return. And the worst part is: it always comes at the end of a job, at the moment production is already waiting and you really just want to move on to the next project.
Batch Publish takes this over completely. You select the documents, choose which formats you need (PDF, DWG, DXF and STEP) and the tool generates everything in a single pass, in the right folders with a fixed naming convention. It works together with Autodesk Vault, so you do not have to check anything out or back in manually. The claim we are willing to make here: 1 click instead of 12 steps, and in practice 48 PDFs in 6 seconds.
Do the math. Say you export 40 drawings a week and it takes you a minute on average per drawing, including switching between formats. That is well over half an hour a week, well over 25 hours a year, for one person, for exporting alone. Work with a team of five design engineers and you are already talking about more than a full working week a year that disappears entirely into routine export work. That is work you get back.
Time-waster 2: retyping BOMs into Excel
The BOM is already in Inventor. Yet time and again it still ends up in Excel, because purchasing wants a fixed template, because your ERP expects a certain column order, or because the costing simply runs in a spreadsheet. So you export the BOM, paste it into the template, shift columns around, clean up the formatting and check that nothing has shifted. And at the next revision you start all over again.
The annoying part is that errors creep in here too. A column that shifts one place over, an item number that pastes incorrectly, a quantity that does not come along. In a BOM for production or purchasing that is no small thing: those are wrong orders and mistakes on the shop floor. And you rarely spot such an error right away: it only surfaces once the wrong profiles have already arrived or the laser has already run.
With BOM Export you pull the BOM straight out of Inventor into Excel in a fixed template. The columns are correct, the formatting is right, and you no longer have to shift or retype anything. At a revision you simply run it again: same structure, updated content, no manual cut-and-paste work.
This shifts your time from retyping to checking. And checking is where your knowledge as an engineer truly adds value: are the quantities right, are the correct parts included, is the structure of the assembly correct. Not whether column F accidentally ended up in column G.
Stop exporting, retyping and sifting through. Let Thundercad handle the routine work, so you can keep working on the design.
Try it free for 30 daysTime-waster 3: messy models that slow you down again every time
Models grow. You sketch a few construction lines, create a work plane for a derived operation, copy geometry to try something out, and leave it there "just in case". Multiply that by months of work and several design engineers, and you end up with an assembly that has a browser full of orphaned features, unused sketches and leftover geometry.
A concrete example. You take an existing frame as the basis for a new machine variant. You suppress a number of extrusions, delete a few holes, copy a work plane to align a new bore and leave the old sketches in place because you "might still need them". Three revisions later that part is full of suppressed features, dead sketches and work planes with nothing attached to them anymore. When a change is needed, no one dares throw anything out, because who knows what it is tied to.
You feel the consequences every single day. The model computes more slowly. The browser is a maze in which your colleagues lose their way. And at a revision no one knows anymore whether that one loose sketch depends on something or can safely be removed. A messy model is a time-waster that pays itself out again every time, to your disadvantage.
The Model Cleaner sorts this out. The tool tracks down leftover geometry and removes it, and tidies up the browser so you can see again what really matters. What remains is a model that computes faster, is easier to hand over and produces no surprises at the next change. Especially with parts you reuse as a starting point for a new variant this makes a huge difference: you start with a clean slate instead of with the legacy of three earlier projects.
Clean models are not a luxury. They are the foundation under every other time saving: a tidy assembly exports faster, gives a more reliable BOM and is immediately understandable to your colleagues. This is investing in speed that you then see returned every working day.
Time-waster 4: uncontrolled metadata and iProperties
iProperties are the kind of work nobody enjoys and that is therefore filled in inconsistently. One design engineer puts the project number in Project, another in Comments. Material is sometimes in capitals, sometimes not. A drawing is missing a description, a part is missing the supplier. On its own each field seems unimportant, but together they make your metadata unreliable.
And metadata is precisely what ties everything together. Your BOM draws on it. Your title block fills itself from it. Your ERP link leans on it. One field that is structurally wrong or empty propagates through your entire document flow, and by the time you discover it, it has usually already been copied along ten times or so.
Think of a common situation: a part gets a new item number, but the old description stays put. Or the mass is overwritten manually because someone did that "real quick" once. Such deviations seep through to your BOM and your ERP without anyone noticing, until purchasing suddenly orders the wrong line.
The iProperty Menu brings calm here. You manage metadata and iProperties through one configurable data card per document type. That means everyone in the department sees the same fields, in the same place, with the same structure. Filling in goes faster because you do not have to search for where something belongs, and more consistently because the card enforces the standard. A new colleague is therefore productive sooner too: they do not have to guess which field you use for what, because the data card tells them.
The difference is not in the minute you save per document, but in the looking-up and repair work you never have to do again. Reliable metadata at the front of the process means no firefighting at the back.
Time-waster 5: endlessly opening, closing and parking files
Working in a large assembly means constant switching. You have to open fifteen parts to make one change, then neatly close everything again. Or you are in the middle of a complex operation, an urgent job comes in, and you have to click away your entire work environment, only to restore it exactly as it was an hour later. That "where was I" recovery is a time-waster that takes your concentration with it, not just your minutes.
For this there are two tools that complement each other. Batch Open & Close opens and closes the files in your assembly all at once, instead of one by one. No more long rounds of clicking through the browser to get the right parts open or shut again.
Quick Save / Load does something different but just as valuable: you park your work and bring it back later exactly as it was. Which files were open, how your work environment was set up, you load it all back in one go and you are right back where you were. No mental startup cost, no five minutes hunting for the right tab. It is precisely those interruptions, the phone, the urgent change, the colleague with a question, that are the silent drain on your productivity, because every time you lose your context, it takes time to get back into it.
For those who want to keep an overview of all these tools, there is the Dashboard: that is where you activate and manage the Thundercad tools and link them to your ERP and other software. And with Sheet Buttons you quickly adjust the sheet size on the fly, up, down or rotate, without clicking through menus.
From scattered time-wasters to a faster working day
None of these five time-wasters is dramatic on its own. A minute here, five minutes there. But they come back every day, for every design engineer, for every project. Added all together, that is the reason your working day consists largely of clicking instead of designing.
The nice thing is that the time-wasters reinforce each other once you tackle them. A clean model exports faster and gives a more reliable BOM. Good metadata makes sure that BOM and your ERP are correct right away. And when opening, closing and parking are no longer a hassle, you keep your attention on the design. Every tool you switch on makes the next step smoother.
Thundercad, the toolbox for Autodesk Inventor, tackles them one by one, within the Inventor environment you already know. You do not have to learn new software or overhaul your process; you only replace the repetitive manual work with a button. Want to see how much it saves in your situation? Check out the knowledge base or go straight to thundercad.net.
Frequently asked questions
Which version of Inventor do I need for Thundercad?
You need Windows 10 or 11, Autodesk Inventor 2025 or newer and an active Autodesk account. Thundercad works together with Autodesk Vault and can be linked to your ERP and other software through the Dashboard.
What does Thundercad cost and can I try it first?
Thundercad costs EUR 30 per user per month or EUR 300 per user per year (that is two months free), excluding VAT, per seat for 1 to 99 users. You can try it free for 30 days, without a credit card.
Does Thundercad help even if I mostly work with large assemblies?
Especially then. Tools like Batch Open & Close, Quick Save / Load and the Model Cleaner are made for the work that takes the most time with large assemblies: opening, closing, parking and cleaning up. The more parts, the bigger the difference you notice.