Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

I have a vendor who uses 2013 Solid Works (In which I have zero experience with) and we use 2013 Inventor and he says he cannot get his Solid Works program to open our Inventor DWGs.  I know I could convert them to DXF files and he would have no problem opening them but that is not our standard when sending parts out and would add an extra process for our purchasing department.  Is there any way besides True View for him to view our DWG files I am missing? 

Thanks

[#2]

your vendor should be able to open and view the dwg files using "Solidworks eDrawings".

I didnt try it with inventor dwg files, but did with acad files.

I could only try it with solidworks 2012, then solidwords could only open 2010 dwg or earlier files.

[#3]

Save the Inventor drawing out as a .dwg file and Solidworks can open them up directly.

[#4]

We currently save all our Inventor drawings as .dwg by default (no .idw).  I have sent him a .dwg and he says he cannot open in Solid Works.  I know there are viewers he can use to view the .dwg but he would like a way to open it directly in Solid Works.  I was hoping there is an add on or such that could accomplish this.  Agian I am unfamiliar with Solid Works so I am of no help.

[#5 · Accepted solution]

I have used Solidworks for 12 years and I know this works.

Maybe he is unfamiliar on how to do it.  Did you look at my attached link

directly from the Solidworks help file?  It even shows it can be done.

This might be an incompatibility issue.  SW 2013 Just came out like this month or last.

So it is possible that this is the case.  Ask him if he has SW 2012 loaded on a different machine and try that one.

[#6]

This makes sense as to in his email he said something along the lines of "hopefully SW will be coming out with a fix any time now" when refering to only being able to open the .dxf and not the .dwg.  I did not realize that SW 2013 was so new.  I have to assume they will have a Service Pack that should fix this soon.

As for the link you posted maybe I am reading it wrong but I thought it was in reference to .ipt and .iam files, not .dwg specifically.

[#7]

If they do it like years past SP 1.0 will be out middle to late Dec or early January.

When you look at the link I provided in the body to the right it does list ipt and iam files,

but if you look in the left margin under file types you will see "DXF/DWG" as files that can open directly

into SW.

[#8]

Thanks for your reply.  Much appreciated.

[#9]

Glad to help.

Best of luck with this.