Inventor Newbie - Standards vs Styles and how they relate to Templates

Hey everyone:

I've posted a few times and as some of you know, I'm trying to kick off Inventor in the small machine shop where I work. I'm the only designer so I can pretty much do whatever I want, but I'm also self-training so I'm pretty much on my own. I've been using AutoCad since 1997 and I've been drawing 3D in vanilla AutoCad for about 4 years now, but I'm new to Inventor.

I'm using AutoDesk's tutorials as well as the ones included in Mastering Inventor 2012. I've found them very useful up to this point, but I'm pretty fuzzy on Standards and Styles and things.

I understand that styles are a group of settings, and how to create new ones and such. I understand that setting object defaults controls which style is used when you create each type of object. And it seems to me that a standard is a group that contains a whole mess of styles and which one(s) are active.

But what I don't understand is where these things are stored and how the "styles library" manages these things. For the most part, I draw 98% of my work on A size sheets and about 80% are inch drawings with the remainder being mm. This being said, should just create my own copy of each of the included templates and create a new standard in each folder? Does a standard live somewhere outside of each template or is that the only place that they reside?

I've also created a title block and I've added it so that in my one template, it shows up in the "drawing resources" tab. But again, do all of the items under there live only in the one template, or is there data that lives in some folder somewhere that assists in migrating the same appearance info from one template to another?

I guess I understand the smaller elements, but I'm kind of at a loss for the big picture and how all this is managed from a higher level. Can anyone help?

thanks!

Excellent question. I second the request. I created the styles and templates that my company uses (not MY company, just where I work), and I feel I'm lacking the general understanding of managing standards. I simply created the templates we use with the appropriate styles of dimensions, text sizes, view annotations and such, but am at a complete loss when thinking about migrating or transferring standards from new drawing to old drawing. What I've used with some success is Export/Import styles, via .styxml files, but I know there's more to it than that.

Thank you to any and all that reply.