From the course: Revit 2025: Essential Training for Architecture

Understanding Revit release versions and file formats - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2025: Essential Training for Architecture

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Understanding Revit release versions and file formats

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- [Presenter] 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 number, like 2024 or 2025, with smaller releases receiving a point designation such as .1 or .2 throughout the year, and so on. Each major release of Revit introduces a new file format, new point releases do not. The critical thing to understand here is that once you upgrade to a new annual release, you cannot save the files backwards. In other words, Revit is not backward compatible. Therefore, it is important to know which version of Revit you are using and, further, that anyone you wish to share Revit files with is using the same Revit 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 Revit version will be able to open the older files just fine, but as soon as they save them there will be no way for them 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. And, naturally, this will make it very difficult for you to collaborate. Now, speaking of Revit versions, we're not talking about different flavors of Revit here, such as Revit or Revit LT, we're only talking about the year number. Now you can identify which version of Revit a file is in the open dialogue. You simply select the file and the version number will be indicated over on the right hand side of the dialogue. If you try and open a file that was saved in a later version, you'll get a message that looks something like this that says that the file cannot be retrieved in this version. And sadly, there is no way to work around this. Now, if you select a file that's saved in an older version, this is fine. When you select that file and open it, it will begin an upgrade process on that file and it will mention that in order to avoid this process in the future you simply need to save the file to make the change permanent. If the file you are upgrading also contains Revit links, then you'll get a second or possibly third or fourth message indicating that the linked file will also be upgraded, however, the upgrade of the link is only temporary. So if you want to make the entire process permanent, you should first open the linked files, upgrade and save those, then open the host file, upgrade and save it, and then it will be permanent moving forward and you won't have to go through the upgrade process again. But, of course, remember that this is a permanent process and it's not backward compatible, and this is by design in the Revit software. So there is no workaround to this, so please plan accordingly. So now that you know what the issues are surrounding file formats, I just want to mention that if you're watching this course and you're not using the latest release of Revit, I have many courses here in the library and Revit Essential Training and Learning Revit, we tend to update every year in the new release. So if you're using a different version of Revit than the one that I am here in this course, I recommend that you go into the library and find the version of the course that matches the version of Revit that you're using.

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