Saving Back to Earlier NWD or NWF Versions

Navisworks allows you to save you files back to earlier versions, even back to JetStream v5 if you are running 2010.  Yes, sorry…2011 can’t natively save back to JetStream file format.  If you are running 2011, you’ll have to save it back to 2010, then open it in 2010 to save it back to a v5 format.

But, there’s a little something I ran into regarding published NWD files.  Had a customer needing to get their files to v5.  They were publishing their files to NWD, but publishing doesn’t allow you to publish to a different format.  So they re-opened the NWD’s to do a save-as to get to the v5 (or in the pull-down, it’s called Navisworks 5) format but they were only getting the option to save as a NWF file.  I noticed during the publish, the check box for “May be re-saved” was unchecked.  So I had them do the publish again but this time check that box.  When they opened the newly published file, they now got the option to save it as a v5 format.  Here’s the screen shots (from 2010) showing the difference, the publish box on the left and then the subsequent save-as dialog when the published file was opened…

Now, you can also get around this by just doing a save-as to your current project and choosing the earlier format.  Just have to be careful that you then close the file and re-open the current project file to continue working.  Otherwise, you’ll hit save and “upgrade” the file you just saved back to an earlier version.