Dear Heinz,
I don't think it's rude to post a Google link, they can be quite helpful. I'm talking generally here - many questions asked on the Forum here can actually be answered by googling, so forgive us for trying to take shortcuts sometimes, it's a lot of work answering all questions here!
Also, I think you should take a look at the timestamps of the answers - I believe Jess posted his answer without seeing your follow-up post, and just going by the original post, it is a generic question which could have a generic answer. In the future, it might be a good idea to put a bit more details in the original post, it saves time and energy for all
As for tools to open NC files, we have no experience with that, actually, as we have not seen any need to use anything but ATK for the purpose. But I believe it will not be possible for you to move data between versions yourself; even if the file from the old version can be read, you will probably not be able to write a valid NC file for the new version, since there are way too many tags and keywords required, and this is not documented.
It's probably a much more fruitful path forward to look at what the actual problem is. The point is, that we try quite hard to ensure that NC files from old versions can be read in new versions of ATK (but not the opposite, naturally). So if you have a NC file that doesn't open, let's focus on that and figure out why.
So, let's keep the tone here civil, as we are all friends and nobody posts answers except with the purpose to help. If the answer is not so helpful, you can point that out, but there is no need to assume that anyone is less than 100% committed to providing good assistance, even if the answers are short sometimes. I also may post a Google link now and then, it doesn't imply that we think you don't know what Google is (if so, we would send you to
http://tinyurl.com/22c6t ).
Finally, could you send me (privately, if you so choose) your affiliation, since I can't map your email to a specific customer account. It's just nice to know who is who, to make things a bit more personal.
Regards,
Anders Blom