From the course: Revit 2023: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial and Metric)

Understanding Revit release versions and file formats - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2023: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial and Metric)

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Understanding Revit release versions and file formats

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- [Instructor] Like most products in the Autodesk portfolio, Revit has a major new release annually with smaller feature releases being made available to customers on subscription throughout the year. Each major release is enumerated with the year, like 2022 or 2023, with smaller releases receiving a point designation, such as 2023.1 or .2, and so on. Each major release of Revit introduces a new file format. Point releases do not. The critical thing to understand here is that once you upgrade to a new release of Revit, you cannot save files backward. In other words, Revit is not backward compatible. Therefore, it is very important that you know which version of Revit you are using, and that anyone you wish to share Revit files with is using the same version as you. It is not advisable to attempt to work with users on different Revit versions. If you do, the person with the more recent version of Revit will be able to open the older files just fine, but if they save them, there will be no way to re-save them back to the older version, making it impossible, for the person using the older release of the software, to access those files moving forward. Now, when speaking of Revit versions here, we are only discussing the Revit version number or the year, not the variation of Revit, such as the commercial, or educational version, or the AEC collection, or Revit LT. Each of those variations uses the same file format, each year. For example, the full version of Revit 2023 and Revit LT 2023, share the same file format. Let's look at the file format issue from within the software. It's easy to identify the current version of the file before you open it. This occurs within the Open dialogue. So begin opening a model, browse to the folder where the file is located, and then simply select it, don't double click it, in order to see the version. The current version of the file will be listed beneath the preview window, over on the right-hand side. If the file you want to open was saved in an earlier version than the current version of Revit you're using, you can simply continue opening that file. And when you do, you will get a message that the model is being upgraded, indicating that it's a one time only process, and further mentioning that you will need to save the file in order to prevent needing to repeat the process in the future. It is also possible that you will see another message that appears indicating that some annotations, schedules and other items related to analytical elements, may be modified or lost during the upgrade process. This is the result of some new functionality in the latest Revit release, simply click Okay to dismiss this warning, should it appear. Now keep in mind, that once you save the file, it will permanently be upgraded to your current release, making it no longer available to users of the previous release. If the file you are opening is from a previous version, and it contains Revit links, then not only will it need to upgrade the host file, but it will also need to temporarily upgrade the link files as well. So, you'll get a message about the host models being upgraded first, and that'll be followed by a second message indicating that each of the linked files will be upgraded as they are accessed as well. Now once again, you may also get a message about the analytical models during the upgrade. Now do keep in mind, that this is a temporary upgrade for the links, even if you save the file. If you want to make the entire upgrade permanent, start instead with the linked files, opening and upgrading each of those first, save them, then open the host model, upgrade it, and save it, to complete the process and avoid having to repeat it in the future. If you're not sure what I mean by links, then don't worry, we'll be exploring those in great detail later in the course. So what happens if you try to open a file that was saved in a later release than the version of Revit that you have? Well, when you try to open the file, a message will display that tells you that the file that you're trying to open was saved in a later version and cannot be retrieved. And unfortunately this means that you will not be able to access the file at all, unless you do so using at least the same release of Revit in which the file was originally saved. Now that you know how Revit deals with versions, allow me to reiterate that it is absolutely critical that all team members be working on the same Revit file version, the same year number. Revit is not being backward compatible, is built in or as designed behavior within the software, and there is no workaround. So please, plan accordingly.

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