Inventor 11 / Inventor 10 compatibility?

Technical Inventor
1

Is there some way to save Inventor 11 files in such a way that they can be used in inventor 10? Our team has Inventor 11 on our personal computers but the school only has Inventor 10. We tried getting Inventor 11 on the school’s computers, and that is probably what will end up happening, but it failed to install

.NET Framework Runtime 1.1 SP1

My guess is we simply didn’t have enough admin. privileges to do this. If anyone knows of a way to import Inventor 10 files or what exactly is going on with the SP please help.

2

I opened the main project in Inventor 11, chose save, change the save type to STEP (you could probably use IGES too) and then open the STEP project in Inventor 10. Lastly, to keep it in an inventor format so you don’t have to reimport every time, save it in inventor style with your inventor 10.

*note We had some problems with this at our school too, but I think its because they didn’t have the STEP/IGES converter installed for 10, but it is available in 10, because it succeeded where I work.

Good Luck

3

Is there any way to do this for .idw drawings. I have to print drawings from work with inventor 6, but I have inventor 11 at home. I can’t print at home because the machinists don’t like 8.5 x 11.

For now I have been saving as .stps and bringing them in and redoing the drawing by scratch. Is there a better way?

4

Inventor does not have a “save as” to an earlier Inventor version - one of its greatest weaknesses, IMHO. To work with an Inventor 11 file using Inventor 10, you will have to save it as STEP or IGES.

5

I don’t remember, when you save an assembly as STEP or IGES, you lose constraints right? What are the differences between the two?

6

Yep. That did the trick. I read the other post about STEP format but I didn’t really understand it at the time :confused: Now all is clear.:cool:

Too bad it deletes all of your constrains. I really gotta get 11 on the school comps… Well I’m off topic.

Thanks for your help I appreciate it.

EDIT 1: (In reply to sparkydp)

7

This is precisely why we still use Inventor R7 on our team. Even though we have 3 years worth of new versions, it seems that there is something about each new version that is incompatible with previous versions. It all seem to get real bad with Inventor R8. So far we’ve gotten by OK.

8

In my opinion anything before Inventor 9 was a dog and a lot of good stuff was added to r11.

9

You could try using the free Inventor View program to view and print the Inventor 11 drawings at work. (Or save as dwg if they have AutoCAD).
It is my understanding that there is a difference between the Inventor View that comes on the install disk and the version intended for computers without Inventor installed. You can find the download page for the viewer by searching Goolge.

10

Yeah, can you get Inventor 10 on Inventor 6? Is it basically the same principal?