The DGN and DWG File Formats

The MicroStation V8 DGN file format is a superset of the MicroStation/J (V7) DGN and AutoCAD DWG file formats. This means that MicroStation V8 files can handle all DWG object definitions, as well as DGN-specific entities that are not understood by AutoCAD. When these DGN entities are saved to a DWG file, MicroStation converts them to DWG-compatible entities so that they can be displayed properly in AutoCAD.

The DXF file format is an ASCII text representation of the DWG format. DXF is an interchange format historically used to exchange data between AutoCAD and other applications. You work with DXF data in MicroStation in the same manner as DWG data. DWG is preferable because its compact binary representation results in smaller files. For the remainder of this topic, the term DWG refers to both DWG and DXF files.