I have a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 on my laptop. When I save files from Word, I can’t open them on my PC, which has Office 2003. So, why can’t Microsoft Office 2007 files be opened in Office 2003?

The reason is due to Microsoft creating a new file format called Office Open XML. There are numerous advantages to this, one being smaller file sizes compared to the older version of office. By default, all Office 2007 files now have an x added to the end; .doc is now .docx, .xls is now .xlsx and so on. Therefore previous versions of Office cannot open these new files natively.

Office 2000, XP and Office 2003 can work with the new file formats (see the Microsoft website to understand what your application will be able to do), but will need the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats to be installed (27.5MB). Please note, Microsoft recommends that you install all high priority updates first.

In case you don’t want to install this, or you want backwards compatibility to Office 97 - 2000, I will show you some ways to save documents so that can be opened by older versions of Office without the add-on.

If you do not need to save files regularly in the old format, you can simply follow this method:

  1. Click on the Office button located in the top left corner.

  2. On the drop down menu, go down to Save As, Then move across to Word 97 - 2003 Document.

If you want Microsoft Word to save in this format automatically, you can do the following:

  1. Click on the Office button in top left corner, and click on Word Options.

  2. In the Word Options window that opens, click on the Save tab.
  3. The first option you have is to Save files in this format. In the drop down list, select Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc) and then click OK.

It’s as simple as that! This process can also be applied to the rest of the Microsoft Office suite.

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