Ever see the error message in Adobe Illustrator that says: “Cannot open the Illustration. The file was generated by a newer version of Illustrator and cannot be opened. Please resave it in a format compatible with your version of Illustrator.” ?

Well in this video I show you my attempt to work around this little and very annoying problem with .EPS files. The problem is that the files generated by a newer version of Illustrator have trouble opening up in older version of AI. If you cannot open EPS files in Illustrator then you should sit tight and watch me work some magic. Most of the time, you can't open the adobe illustrator file DIRECTLY, rather, you can create a new document to drag and drop the file into. This method should work whether you are using CS3, CS4, CS5 or CS6. My EPS file came from CS6 and the whole thing started when I needed to open an Illustrator CS6 file in CS5, the version I was running.

The second way of doing this is to use a file converting service that can convert the file into .PDF. I really like Cloud Convert and highly recommend their service to perform this exact task. Simply upload your EPS file and convert it into a PDF document. Then you will be able to open it in Illustrator! All of the vector lines will stay intact, the colors will also convert.



This video solves the following question about opening EPS files from newer versions of Illustrator.
Need Help Converting illustrator 11 to illustrator 10 : Adobe Illustrator !
I can't open illustration, file was generated by a newer version
Opening new Illustrator files in an older version - Mac OS
Illustrator, Issues opening CS3/ Mac .eps and .ai files
Why can't I open an EPS file with Illustrator
I'm getting an error about my EPS being created with a newer version of Illustrator.
Help! I can't open my EPS file!