Word 2003 incompatibility

[Guest]

Before updating to Office 2003 I painstakingly did quite a bit of research to
determine that we would not have any backwards compatibility problems. All
information I found said that Office 2003 was backwards compatible, allowing
users to easily share documents between different versions of Office.

However, we have found this not to be the case. Documents that we have
created in (for e.g.) Word 2003 when opened in Word 2000 alot of the
formatting appears differently. For example, in Word 2003 you can rotate an
image in the header. This feature is not available in Word 2000 and as such
when you open the document in 2000 the graphic that was rotated has now
returned to its original alignment.

I have set the Tools > Options > Compatibility to 'Recommended options for
Microsoft Word 2000', but the problem is still occuring.

As we do a lot of design work on 2003 for our consultants who are still
using 2000, this is a very critical issue. I really do not want to have to
revert to using Office 2000. Does anyone know of a way that we can lock the
formatting in our Office 2003 documents but still enable Office 2000 users to
view and edit the text of the document?

 

[Graham Mayor]

Inevitably new functions are introduced in each version of Word and
obviously those functions wouldn't be available in earlier versions. The
best you can manage to ensure backward compatibility is to choose Tools >
options > save > and disable features after Word 2000.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

Great advice! Never realized that was there.

However, I don't seem to have it. I have Office 2003 (Word 2003 SP1) running
on XP Pro and the only two choices it gives me for the Disable feature in the
dropdown is to go back to 6.0/95 or to 97. There's no 2000 listed there
(which is what I want since my other computers still run Word 2000).

What's up with that?

 

[Graham Mayor]

That's what comes of not looking at the option dialog before posting
In this instance set to Word 97 will effect the compatibilty you require,
but see also the tools > options > compatibility options.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

Seems to me that, in general, for everyday simple usage the defaults will be
fine and editing sometimes in Word for Office 2003 and sometimes in Office
Word 2000 will pose zero problems.