Save back to earlier versions

[craigr.74241]

Is this possible? Lets say I convert to Revit 9, but I have a consultant, or another project team in my company, working in Revit 8.1 for the foreseeable future. They need something from my project. Ordinarily, I'd open the worksets I want to give them, then save the file as... and send it over. But they can't read my Revit 9 file. Is there any export, save as, or outside converter to do this?

[Tobie]

Was not possible in 8.1 and I don't think you can do it in 9 either.

[David Haynes]

There is no way to save back to an earlier version. It is important when working with consultants using the Revit Product line that you are on the same version.

There is no known workaround.
Regretfully,

[greg.mcdowell]

Not an ideal certainly, but could you export the 3D model to an AutoCAD DWG that they could then link into a Generic Model? I would guess you could and that the functionality wouldn't be too different than how I assume things should work anyway... I don't want my engineers moving things that are Architectural (that's my job). Anyway, worth a shot.

[robmorfin]

You can't, and in a way it's good because this forces everybody to keep the software updated (there are alot of AutoCAD users still using R14), and also it prevents piracy of Revit at least to a point that they can't catchup with the updates, which forces them to buy it, thence Autodesk can invest more money on Revit updates and can lower the prices to us the consumers sometime in the future.

[Scott D Davis]

The following is a post made by Irwin Jungreis, one of the Revit Founders, that was made to a similar topic on the Autodesk Revit Newsgroups. Thanks Irwin for explaining it from a development standpoint. Let's continue to move forward!

As far as I know, there is no parametric 3D modeling software that allows you to save from one version to an earlier version that
keeps the model live. That applies to mechanical CAD systems such as Pro/E, not just architectural systems.

Implementing such backward compatibility would be a very challenging technical problem. Remember, you not only need to convert new
objects into old objects , you need to convert new relationships between different elements into old relationships that work
approximately the same way. In every version there are many changes, including bug fixes, to how different elements behave when
other related elements change (e.g., wall joins and family parameters). Figuring out how to downgrade a set of elements with many
relationships between them in such a way that the downgraded elements will work correctly or even just not crash in the old software
(which has the bugs), is challenging. For the parametric systems with which I'm familiar just getting _forward_ compatibility to
work in all cases requires a very significant effort -- you fix a bug in the old software and then old projects that have the bug
built into them stop working.

The QA side of things would also be a nightmare. In order to test backward compatibility you'd need projects built using the new
version of the software. Keep in mind that the new version of the software is changing up until pretty close to the release date.
Also keep in mind that building a sample project of any reasonable complexity takes months. You also need a set of projects that
cover every possible combination of every kind of element with all different configurations and relationship. It isn't enough to
simply upgrade the old projects and then see if they can be downgraded -- to properly test things you'd need to build projects using
the new version.

I'm not saying that backwards compatibility is impossible. But, it would be a significant tax on all new development and bug fixing
in the software (forever, not just one time), and it would add at least months to the QA time needed to get the software out every
release. All this effort and time could instead be used to make other improvements to the software.