One of my customers has sent me some drawings of some sheet metal component from one of his customers as Inventor part, assembly & drawing files which I would like to open and produce flattened patterns to send off to my laser cutter but I do not have Inventor.

When I attempt to open them using the Inventor drop down options in Solidworks I get an error message saying that it is an unsupported Inventor version which I believe is due to the Inventor files being later than what Solidworks can recognise. I thought that when 2012 SP3 came out I might be able to do it but I am still getting the same error message.

I can get the files resent in other formats, I have Solidworks 2012 SP3 Professional with FeatureWorks so I was wondering what file format would be best to ask them to send me.