Microsoft Office Compatibility Issues

[Chaddy]

Hi, I'm just having a little dilemma at the moment and I was wondering, if anyone has ideas/solution or have encountered the same thing.

 

Recently my school has downloaded some resources. The files were done in the 2007 office format, and therefore incompatible with 2003 (which we have installed). Meaning that I had to install the compatiblity pack from MS onto each computer, in order for the teachers to be able to run/read these files, and for the children to use them.

 

It has managed to work on most of the files that they're running but not all. On some files, I am encountering the following error, `failed to save file`. Does anyone know what I should do? I've tried opening it in MS's XML viewer and changing the file extension but no luck. Its a shame we don't have 07 office

Edited February 20, 2013 by Chaddy

[CyberNerd]

MSOffice isn't exactly known for its compatibility between versions! Try LibreOffice where it fails.

[Aethon]

If you have SharePoint, Office 365 or even a hotmail\live account, upload the file to there and you can open it in the web browser.

[rich_tech]

we found in our school that it was just better getting everyone up to a same level when it comes to this stuff, our admin machines were all 2003 until recently, while our curriculum side were all 2010 and it was causing havoc when people were sending files across versions, even the compatibility pack does not help massively.

 

What I would say, is try and get your office versions up as high as possible, from my experience, the higher the version the easier it is to open files from previous versions. (If your with an EES education agreement for your M$ Products your laughing because it covers you for all the newest versions) and support ends for 2003 versions of office from next year along with windows XP.

 

Failing that as others have suggested try the openoffice varieties of programs and see if they open the newer based files better than your version of office with the compatibility pack installed.

[jmak]

I found some docs which worked in libre office didn't work in open office and vice versa. Google docs was pretty good, but the most reliable way of viewing documents with correct formatting was on an iPad. Only that's not great for editing. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but in the end I had to accept that the most straightforward thing to do was upgrade to a compatible version of M$ Office. It really, really hurt...

[rich_tech]

I forgot to add, another thing that will no doubt cause problems is that staff then, will continue to use files long since created in those old versions of Office, we have stuff still being used here in 97-2003 format still popping up and causing problems, because "thats the file they have always used"

 

Hence us getting everyone up to the same platform where we can, to eliminate these things happening for us.