AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

I do 90+% of my work in Civil 3D, grading, surfaces, xsections, profiles, etc. most of the other people in the office are working with AutoCAD 2007 vanilla version. They would like me to save back all my work, so they can open the drawings without asking me to open the drawing they need and save it back to 2007. What will that do to my work, will I lose any functionality or features, or can I just continue and every day when I'm done, save it back to 2007. They don't want separate versions of the drawing so saving with a prefix of acad2007 isn't going to work for us. We're a small office so upgrading the remaining workstations to 2012 or Civil 3D is also not an option.

What size of pandora's box will we be peeking into? Any help comment/feedback would be appreciated. Before I start saving back all my grading plans and drawings to 2007.

Thanks in advance.

[#2]

Technically speaking, this is possible.  You can set AutoCAD to save to whatever format you need.  Then when you hit save it just saves to that format.  This just makes me nervous, saving C3D objects back and then opening it up after others saved in 2007.  I have no proof that this causes problems, it's supposed to work and it does.  It just feels like something is going to happen.

You need to set PROXYGRAPHICS to 1 in all of your files so the others will be able to see your C3D objects.

[#3]

There is an EXPORTTOAUTOCAD2007 command. This will explode all Civil 3D objects. So you will no longer have a drawing that is functional as a Civil 3D drawing. It will just be dumb vanilla AutoCAD entities. Or you can saveback without exploding if the proxy graphics work for them. But either way, it's no longer a Civil 3D drawing.

But it can't work as you're coworkers want. Once saved to an earlier version a drawing will no longer have ANY use in Civil 3D. No grading, surface, alignments, etc. It will be like you got a drawing from a shop that only uses AutoCAD.

I think you can figure out your choices. Continue saving back so your coworkers have a different version, bring everyone up to Civil 3D or abandon using Civil 3D and design in AutoCAD 2007.

Allen

[#4]

Matt,

Are you sure? I've always been told that once a drawing is saved to a previous version it is no longer a viable Civil 3D drawing. I've never tried this because of that so I can't say I've had experience with it.

Allen

[#5]

I'm sure.  Try it.  Save a file back to a previous version and then open it in the latest version.  It'll work.

[#6]

That would be correct, you can save the drawing back. There is no problem with autocad saving it back. The problem is when you save it back the civil 3d object will not work with previous versions. As long as your coworkers are only doing outocad work it will work fine. All civil 3d objects are disabled when saving back to a previous version.