My co-worker has Inventor 8, and has produced many drawing files which I am unable to open using Inventor 7. I am able to see the preview image, but when I attempt to open the idw file, I get "database schema" error. Any ideas?
IV 8 is not backwards compatible. You cannot directly read IV 8 files into IV 7. If you really need to seem them, your coworker would have to export as one of the neutral formats, but then you would lose the associativity.
Other than that you would have to upgrade your seat to IV 8 to be able to see the file.
My personal opinion is to jump into the 8 fire, with SP 1. I wouldn't dream of running 7 after the 2 months on 8. It's that much better in my opinion...still some things missing but much better than 7.