On 10/12/13 22:43, David R. Birch wrote:
On 12/10/2013 12:02 PM, F. George McDuffee wrote:
This just hit my in-box and may be of interest to the group

http://www.solidworks.com/launch/pro...2013&pmid=4270


I was really eager to bring SW to my company, and last year we finally
did so.

In all the things I had read about it, no one ever mentioned that
there was no compatibility from release to release. If you wanted to
open a file created in SW10, you had to have SW10 installed on your
system. It didn't matter that you had SW12, SW13 or whatever. SW
allows you to install older releases than the one you bought. I sure
want to install umpteen versions of the same thing because my clients
don't all have the same release I do. What is especially grating is
that SW will display the CAD before it tells you it can't open it.

As it stands, to export a file, I'm better off saving it as a DWG or
DXF, which most CAD packages can handle.

David

That is pretty appalling but even Microsoft have played that game as
some versions of VB wouldn't load previous projects, you had to cut and
paste the content into a new project. At a company I used to work for we
went to some lengths to make sure that older versions of the software
database would automatically be updated to the latest format and
suitable defaults set in new data fields so that customers data was
preserved and usable.