Autocad Mechanical save as to autocad 2000

[Steve030373]

I am creating drawings in mechanical 2013 and saving them as acad 2000. However my colegues cant seem to work with them using acad 2002 and acad 2007 or even mechanical 2007. They can't work with my tables or annotative scaled dimensions. my tables don't even show up in thier drawings and they can't edit my dimensions. Is there another setting or version I should try saving as? I don't want to give up tables or annotative scaling as they save me soo much time.

[steve216586]

I personally wouldn't save a mechanical drawing back further than 2004. 2007 should be ok with most data but may have problems with specialty items such as annotative objects. For your users who are using 2002 and earlier, I feel bad for them. But most of that stuff wasn't available back then, and so a save to that version, will corrupt that data, as you have found out. When dealing with users who refuse to upgrade, for whatever reason, I usually keep two versions. (I know that is far from ideal but a necessity to my sanity) It just isn't worth the headache to lose all the important data for newer versions, when it is time to revise drawings, just so a few users can open the drawings. I'd rather them tell me what revisions to make and do it in a new version, then send the results.

[pendean]

Verticals like MECH lock out lower DWG-format verticals and AutoCAD from editing their native core custom object types. This is by design, there is nothing you can do about it. Nothing.

Workarounds are for everyone to turn on and use PROXYGRAPHICS and PROXYSHOW (then saving) and everyone stares at but not edit the content, OR you in 2013 explode your objects before sharing. Or everyone you share files with upgrades to 2013-2014. Or you go back to 2007 or 2000.

The -EXPORTTOAUTOCAD command (there is a dash in the name that must be included) does a decent job of exploding your files for you and saving them as new files to share. Since you are going back so far I would suggest you aim for R14 or R2000 formats for everyone.

You have very few choices or options.