2011 exporter in Autocad 2010?

[steve.perkio]

I'm hearing from my I.T. team that the Navisworks 2011 NWD exporter won't work in AutoCAD 2010.

My 2010 exporter works fine, but I need to be able to create 2011 NWD's (easily).

We lose so much production time migrating that we're trying to skip AutoCAD 2011 and upgrade when 2012 becomes available.

Anyone have any input on this?

Perk

[john.gray]

Hi Perk,

I take it that you are using Navisworks 2011, but still using AutoCAD 2010. If so, what about continuing to use your 2010 exporter, as those would have no problem being used in Navis 2011. Not sure I'm following what you are being asked to do.

We have done similar in our design department. We have all been using AutoCAD 2010, and first upgraded our Navis 2010 to 2011. The 2010 exporter will still work fine. We have slowly been upgrading our guys to 2011. It's not as bad as we had expected.

If you do end up biting the bullet and upgrading to AutoCAD 2011, I would recommend uninstalling AutoCAD 2010 first before installing AutoCAD 2011. The one time we installed 2011 without uninstalling 2010, there several small issues going on related to the graphics in 2011 (after closing a drawing in 2011 with editor still open, an invisible blank bar appeared at the bottom of the editor in which your mouse couldn't curse over, it would skip over the blank bar, and remain there until you restarted AutoCAD). But all other times in which we uninstalled AutoCAD 2010 first, 2011 would run great after install.

Hope this serves useful,

-John

[steve.perkio]

Thanks John,

I have one job that requires posting a 2011 nwd along with .dwg's (they are reluctantly accepting 2010 .dwg's).

I know that they could append 2010 nwd's, but that's not what they require per the contract.

Perk

[rick.rios]

Perk,

I see how they're trying to force the issue of upgrading. For the time being I don't see a quick way around except opening up the dwg file on Navis 2011 and saving as an NWD.

Any reasonable contractor would be fine with you uploading 2010 NWD files because they can easily append them to Navis 2011. But if theyre going to enforce contract verbiage that will not affect productivity then the I.T. department will have to face it and upgrade your AutoCad to 2011. So far all works great on my end.

Why wait until 2012 comes around anyway? It will only take a day at the most to upgrade and get all of the settings working properly. Then when 2012 is released they will want you to wait until service packs come out because of bugs in the software.

Rick

[john.gray]

I could understand the concern if they were on 2007, and you were giving them 2011 files. But it's a funny whacky world we live in when people are hesitant to use a file from an older version, especially if it's only one release different.

I agree with Rick in the aspect that the upgrade shouldn't take long. Maybe an hour or two to uninstall 2010 and install 2011, and tweak your third-party software to taste. And I haven't seen anything different with 2011 that might throw anyone off getting used to right away.

If your guys like to tweak their own AutoCAD, I'd add in an extra couple hours for them if they like to play with their settings. Once I set up the first 2011 machine, I'll typically tweak the new workspaces and save the tweaked CUI files, profile and separate workspace CUI on the server for easy importing to other machines.

Good luck with the upgrades! It shouldn't be too painful.

-John