modern eda interoperability?

[Smokey]

I'm stuck using PCAD2006 at work.  I can't convince anyone to upgrade to Altium designer, partly because PCAD is still working(kind of), and partly because they are scared off by the FPGA stuff in designer. 

My question is, what is the state of interoperability as far as being able to open layouts and schematics from one program in another?  A consultant is using PADS and no one here has any experience with it.  Is Altium Designer able to work with other programs file formats, specifically PADS?  Does any modern EDA have that ability?

How do you guys deal with designs in other formats that you have to be able to work with?

[free_electron]

Altium readspads, pcad, allegro,orcad,, zuken and a few otherswithout problems

Profesionally i need to interact with customers using allegro , boardstation, pads , orcad and zuken.
They send me their databeses and i simply load those in altium done

The way back is another story though... It is up to the other tool vendor to read altium. But you can always go the gerber orodb++ route

[Smokey]

Is that true for schematic and PCB?

Can pads read Altium if we need to go the other way?

[EEVblog]

Altium bought P-CAD, and did a lot of work trying to make it seamless for PCAD users to switch to AD, so should work pretty well. And if there are issues, support should be good.

You can just ignore all the FPGA stuff in AD if you want to. No need to learn or touch that in order to use AD as a basic PCB/SCH tool (as 95% of users do). No need to be scared of it.

Dave.

[free_electron]

Schematic and pcb yes. For some tools you also need the libraries and or you need to save in a specific version, but that is no problem. I do this all the time. Pads needs the ascii format. Zulen needs the old cadstar format.

[Smokey]

Ya i guess PCAD2006 came with this limited version of Altium Designer 6 that was supposed to be a tease to do the full upgrade. 

I'm all for upgrading.  I've been pushing it since I got here.  I think the hold up is that change in general is scary, especially when something is working passably.  Look at WindowsXP.

Being interoperable with Pads might be the thing that finally pushes it through though.  I didn't know you could do that before now.

On a side note, where would you place Pads in the spectrum of EDA packages?  They seem to be pretty big, but don't get talked about as much from what I can tell.