Issue:
Users began experiencing an issue where they were unable to save changes to iParts. They received no errors when saving the files in Inventor. Once we noticed that their changes were not being saved, we checked the Read/Write status of the Inventor files and found they were fully editable.
This behavior affected all users, and, in this case, the files were not Vaulted so Vault permissions were not involved. There were no obvious reasons that the user’s changes were not being saved to the files or reasons why this issue only affected iParts and did not affect other part files.
Causes:
The cause of this issue was determined to be related to a corporate security policy which had been enabled on Excel tables/worksheets. This particular security setting prevented editing of the Excel files without the user explicitly selecting a security option while working directly inside of Excel. Since iParts do not require the user to directly edit the table in Excel, the users were not presented with their company’s security prompt while editing the files inside Inventor.
Solution:
The only way to resolve this issue was to open the Excel table associated with the iPart in Excel so the user would be prompted with their company’s security prompt inside of Excel. We were able to do this by Right-clicking on the “Table” icon in the Inventor browser as show below:
Once Excel opened, the user would then have the option to interact with the security prompt, allowing changes to be made to the iPart and the iPart to then be saved with their changes intact. Keep in mind that choosing “Edit Table” will bring the tool up in Inventor and will NOT provide the Excel interface needed to continue.
Hopefully, this will save you some time and frustration if your company decides to implement a similar security policy.
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