Working in an enterprise system. We need to determine if everyone needs to update to 10.6 at the same time for mxd cross-compatibility or can we update from 10.5 as needed.
5 Answers
You need to save a copy of the mxd to an earlier version if you have saved the mxd in ArcGIS latest version 10.6.
Based on ArcGIS help: Saving a map:
New documents cannot be opened in earlier versions of the software; however, you can use the Save A Copy command to make a copy of a map document so you can open and work with it in previous versions of ArcGIS.
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6Just tested 10.6 vs 10.5, can confirm must use Save A Copy in order for it to work– MaksimCommented Jan 29, 2018 at 15:27
The MXD Doctor will also work. The tool can be found here..
C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.6\Tools
As @JordanMiller mentioned, the MXD Doctor can fix the mxds, but not just looking backwards, but from future releases. I just used the 10.5 MXD Doctor to backward save some 10.6 mxds for use in 10.5 (I had to downgrade for HEC-GeoHMS and HEC-GeoRAS, and didn't think to save as before uninstalling 10.6).
I have had a similar issue and I used Python script to fix it... You need to open a blank document in ArcMap, then open the Python window. Then copy/paste the following code, just repoint the path to the proper mxds...
mxd_path=r"path/to/the/10_5_mxd.mxd"
mxd= arcpy.mapping.MapDocument(mxd_path)
mxd.saveACopy(r"path/to/the/new/10_4_mxd.mxd","10.1")
In ArcMap 10.6 the list of options for the version parameter are: ['10.1', '10.0', '8.3', '10.3', '9.0', '9.2', '9.3']
To convert 10.8 in 10.7 i had to use 10.6 as temporary step, direkt use of saveACopy lead to Error.
import arcpy # 10.7
mxdFile = r"D:\Dir\Chart.mxd" # 10.8
mxdArc = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument(mxdFile)
mxdArc.saveACopy(mxdFile.replace(".mxd", "_10.6.mxd"), "10.6")
del mxdArc
mxdArc = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument(mxdFile.replace(".mxd", "_10.6.mxd"))
mxdArc.saveACopy(mxdFile.replace(".mxd", "_10.7.mxd"))