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Advice on how to open a DWG file?

I have files with a DWG extension. They were made a bunch of years ago and are supposedly blueprints. they are about 100KB files. They've been sitting on a thumb drive for years.

I've tried opening them with irfanview and LibreCAD. Both say they can't open them.

I used https://www.zamzar.com/convert/dwg-to-pdf/ for one of them and it made a PDF with some rectangular shapes / lines, but likely not all that shoudl be there and not aligned correctly (1 rectangle is off to the side). Is it because they are old and newer programs cant render them correctly? Or they corrupt?

Any recommendations on a universal viewer or something that might be able to open the files? We're looking to make PDFs or something so we can print them on a large paper printer at staples.

Hello There

Download DWG TrueView for free. It's just for this.

https://www.autodesk.com/products/dwg/viewers

Open the file and save it as PDF.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Dhruv Bisht

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ASKER

Hello - yes, that looks great! And I had fun spinning the drawing around / even looking at it from behind : )

But I don't know the first thing about autocad / coulnd't even zoom in

I have visio and that opened one of them. Gotta figure how to print just what's in the frame of the drawing rather than the entire 'page' I know / used visio a little bit... so I'll use this.

Thank you both!