Every 12 – 18 months we find ourselves upgrading our Inventor and Vault (I hope you are using it, its FREE!!) and there are many steps that need to be performed to get a clean and seamless upgrade working from release to release.

One issue that comes up is with custom libraries.  When upgrading your Inventor and Vault software you need to remember to migrate all partm assembly and drawing templates, design data (styles and standards) as well as your customised library content.

One particular issue which came up recently was the custom library was not available.  So what do we do to get it up and running.

The first step is  to make sure that the custom library (the extension is .idcl) is in the directory where the Inventor project is looking for libraries.

Once this is done you will still not be able to access the library as it needs to be migrated to the version that you are currently using.

If you are working on a Vault project you will need to check out the project and so that you can make edits (in this case it would be to migrate the custom library file.)

Selecting the configure libraries icon in the project brings up the below dialog box.  You will notice that My Library has a yellow exclamation mark next to it.

This library needs to be updated.  In the bottom right hand corner you will find the update tool. (yellow lightning bolt)

Selecting this takes you through the update wizard.

Once everything uis updated with no errors you will have full access to your custom libraries.