On Tuesday, December 10, 2013 7:18:17 PM UTC-8, David R. Birch wrote:
On 12/10/2013 7:25 PM, Ned Simmons wrote:

On Tue, 10 Dec 2013 16:43:02 -0600, "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



Sure you don't have something else going on? I don't recall ever

having a problem opening SW files from previous versions. Out of

curiosity, I just opened the oldest file I could find in my backups -

it hasn't been touched since May 2009 - and it opened with no

complaints. This machine has only SW 2012 & 2013 installed.



What I have going on is exactly what I was told in SW training. They

said we were free to install earlier releases to handle SW CAD from

clients. Big whoop.



David

You install earlier releases of SolidWorks so when your client sends you a native SolidWorks file, from an older SolidWorks version that they want you to modify, when you send it back to them, all the history is preserved.

For the most part SolidWorks isn't backwards compatible meaning if you modify their Solidworks 2009 file in SolidWorks 2014 they can't read it when you send it back. There was a change made that now allows some backwards compatibility in newer SolidWorks versions. Think this first happened in SolidWorks 2013 or 2012 not sure but it's relatively new, has limitations and I don't trust it.

Is this now sinking in you ****ing moron?