idw VS dwg

[gmarken]

Hello,

What are the advantages of saving Inventor drawings as .dwg files instead of .idw files?

We currently save as .idw.

[Thomas_Savage · Accepted solution]

Hello @gmarken 

.IDW was the original drawing file for Inventor, as i believe Inventor couldn't create .DWG.

Most people save their drawing files as .DWG or Inventer.DWG as they can easily be opened in AutoCAD and Trueview to be looked at, or edited. Also .DWG are usually larger files than .IDW.

Hope this helps.

Thomas.

[johnsonshiue · Accepted solution]

Hi! In terms of the data structure, the two file formats (Inventor idw and dwg) are the same. In terms of file size, idw may be slightly smaller than dwg but the difference is negligible. The advantage of using dwg is that you can open the file in AutoCAD without any conversion. Also, if your company has templates, blocks, annotation processes built on AutoCAD, you can preserve them in Inventor dwg. For example, preexisting AutoCAD blocks can be inserted to Inventor dwg easily.

Many thanks!

[gmarken]

Thanks for the reply.

[gmarken]

Thanks for your reply.