How do you use Fusion 360 offline mode? What can it do? What are the capabilities and what are the gotchas you need to know about coming up?

Hey, this is Tyler Beck with tech and espresso. Today, we're talking about Fusion 360 offline mode. So let's just jump right into it. I've got a file that I need to work on, and maybe I'm going to go, I'm going to commute home. I'm gonna get, you know, on an airplane and maybe the wifi is going to be really spotty. I'm going to go to a cabin and work, whatever the scenario is, fusion does have an offline mode. You can access it here with this job status tool, and you can see that I am working offline. So when I click this green by default, it's going to go online. Okay. So where do you find information about the offline mode?

 (00:54):

You can jump into the help or look at it here. Okay. So some reasons that it's going to trigger the offline mode that they mentioned is any kind of unexpected outage that does happen with fusion from time to time, or if you don't have internet connection or they're doing maintenance. All right. So it's worth noting that Fusion 360, although the offline mode, I think it's really cool that it offers this. It's not a true browser CAD tool. It's kind of a hybrid cloud desktop application. Right? So, um, I love that there is an offline mode, but I think it's worth noting. It is limited, right? There's some things you can and can't do. So let's look at that. All right. So now that we're in offline mode, when I look at this, I can see these three great out designs. And that's telling me that none of them have been cached locally. So how do we fix that? If we jump back in and trigger our online mode and I'm kind of anticipating going offline or traveling or whatever, the reason what I want to do is get these ready. And there's lots of ways I can do it. One is the simplest is just double click and open the file.

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Now that it's open, this is going to be cashed and available to me. So let's test it, go to offline mode. I noticed these are still, these are now grayed out because they've never, they haven't been cash, but this one is it's available, right? So I can verify I closed that still there. I can open this work on it, offline on any of my projects that I've started. I can cash the entire project or at any time I can find a specific design right click and add to offline cash. There you go. So you can kind of handpick and keep in mind. If you do have a design that references other designs, it will cash all of them, except for drawings. I think drawings have to actually be opened or chosen as cash. Okay. Another huge, gotcha. Fusion 360 has all of this great cloud technology they solve for one of those as exports and file translation.

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So one thing to be aware of this is a huge one. I've I've seen a lot of this in the forums. Ready? Here we go. When I go to file, save as or export, you get the entire list, but it doesn't work, right? DXF no OBJ. No. The only thing that it can export as is the fusion native or the parametric style of file export. So you can do [inaudible] and sat and step you can't do STL. That's a, you know, it's a mesh file to different type of file. So Sirius file translation. You need to be an online mode to be able to do this. Okay. Another thing to be aware of with Fusion 360 and the offline mode is the amount of saves, right? So you can save as many times as you want. So if I were to add a little hole here and make a change, you know, modify this great, and now I want to save that

 (04:08):

I'm working offline. I hit save. It's going to allow me to save it. It doesn't track versions. It's only gonna save all the little changes you made. So if you're used to using versioning with Fusion 360, where you're able to track and go back and promote and kind of work between the different options, you can do all that in online mode. So again, adding another feature, if we do that, this is going to get added. And if I hit save, all of those versions are not being tracked. Use just whatever was saved. Last that will go into the design. So now that if we go back online, I expect this latest and last save to be saved in. As my latest version can see, it's kind of updating. Now, it's now saving into the data panel, took about 30 seconds. And now I have these versions to look. You can see even the notes from, uh, you know, at dynamically notifies you that this was from an offline mode save. And I've kind of gone in and out of this, uh, particular design, I think a few times. So a few other things to be aware of Fusion 360, you need most Autodesk products for that matter. You need to come check back in within two weeks.

 (05:30):

So if you're considering Fusion 360 using a tool, always an offline mode, it is not a great fit, right? You have to check in every two weeks as well as what we saw the file export limitations, all of the different cloud solve technologies that are available and very cool with fusion. Those don't work. So definitely look elsewhere if you need an offline tool all the time. Hey, thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, hit that like button hit that subscribe button. Let me know in the comments down below what videos you need to see on fusion or any other technology tutorials. Thanks so much.