“The 2018 file was made with Covadis 15,” his junior technician, Lena, said, peering over his shoulder. “We’re on Covadis 16 now, with AutoCAD 2024. It should work. Should. ”
Here’s what they learned over the next three hours, and what every firm should know: covadis 16 compatibilite autocad
That word— should —is the most dangerous word in civil engineering. “The 2018 file was made with Covadis 15,”
Marc, a senior topographer at Géomètres du Sud , opened the file in AutoCAD 2024. The drawing loaded, but something was wrong. Manholes appeared as generic circles instead of the precise blocks he expected. Water mains had lost their hydraulic attributes. And the coordinate system? It had defaulted back to World UTM, ignoring the local Lambert projection. Should
Marc closed AutoCAD 2024. He reopened the file using the dedicated (which forces the correct AutoCAD version profile). He ran the Migration Wizard on the 2018 drawing, selecting “Full conversion with attribute preservation.”
Covadis 16 saves natively to AutoCAD 2018 DWG format by default. If you open that file in AutoCAD 2024 without Covadis loaded, you’ll see everything—but the intelligence is gone. To preserve intelligence, you must use the “Save as Covadis” command, not AutoCAD’s native save.
Covadis 16 includes a “Migration Wizard” for files from versions 13-15. Marc had skipped it, assuming newer AutoCAD would brute-force compatibility. It doesn’t work that way. The wizard doesn’t just open the file; it decompiles old Covadis primitives and recompiles them into Covadis 16’s native schema. This is mandatory, not optional.