office 2007 2003 compatibility??!!??

C

Carter

i have just discovered that after upgrading to office 2007 that documents
sent to others are not able to be opened in previous versions of office!! In
some cases, word or another office program will promp for the compatibility
pack but in most cases it will just open as symbols and jibberish.

Can this really be the case?? Are office 2007 users on an Office Island
with compatibility only with other 07 users??

PLEASE PLEASE - i would welcome feedback.
 
C

Carter

I understand both of the options-except that the compatibility pack didn’t
work on several documents that i created in word 07 and opened in XP- what
concerns me more is that i have been posting word docs to job boards and
other sites for a while now and I’m wondering if they are getting all just
the nonsense that i get when i open the files.


It seems like that by upgrading - you are in essence screwing yourself.
This is hard for me b/c I am actually one of the people that waves a pretty
big msft flag - I love what they have always done but I don’t think I ever
want to be an early adopter again.
 
B

Beth Melton

The recipient needs the compatibility pack installed, not you. The reason
some are getting prompted to install it is because they have all of the
current updates for their version of Office. The recent updates include an
"awareness patch" that will prompt those who use previous versions of Office
to install the compatibility pack if they try to open a file saved in the
new file format. But they either need to update Office or download the
compatibility pack manually and install it.

On your end, if you are sharing files with others, all you have to do is
save your documents in the 97-2003 file format which is listed in the Files
of Type in the Save As dialog box. If you want to set the previous file
format as a default save type (so you don't accidently forget to change it),
click the Microsoft Office Button, click Word Options, click Save, and it's
the first option.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Co-author of Word 2007 Inside Out:
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/9801.aspx#AboutTheBook

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/
 
E

Echo S

Beth Melton said:
The recipient needs the compatibility pack installed, not you. The reason
some are getting prompted to install it is because they have all of the
current updates for their version of Office. The recent updates include an
"awareness patch" that will prompt those who use previous versions of
Office to install the compatibility pack if they try to open a file saved
in the new file format. But they either need to update Office or download
the compatibility pack manually and install it.
Click to expand...

In addition they must have all "high priority" Windows Updates installed. It
says that on the compat pack download page, but I think it's very easy to
miss.

I ran into this myself -- I had to install a ton of Windows Updates, and
then I had to go and separately install a bunch of Office updates (this was
Office 2003, but still...) before the compat pack would work.
 
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