# Opening excel 2007 files in 2003



## agarrity (Nov 18, 2008)

OK now i'm sure there is a simple explaination for this but I'm having a very hard time. I have a computer that has Office 2003 on it and almost everyone else in the company has 2007. It is very important that this person be able to open the 2007 Workbooks from her computer so I downloaded the FileformatConverter.exe from Microsoft's website. She can open the files but they all open in Read-Only for some reason. We don't want to save the files back to an earlier version either...is there any way to open these from that desktop so that it isn't in read-only?


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## ratcat73 (Oct 17, 2008)

G'day

The only problem that I see with saving back to xl 2003 is that if you use the new formulas from xl 2007 like

Countifs
Sumifs
If statement that been nested more than 7 times
Array formula with Named Ranges

Just to name a few of the top of my head.

If you don't use any new 2007 features you can save the file as a 97-2003 workbook file .xls. 
You can default this in 2007 and have a 'Compatibility Checker' mode on and it will warn you at time of saving what will not convert back to the older versions. 

Saving back to the older version the differents will be that the file size will grow. I've seen in some cases more than double.

Well that my two cents worth.


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## agarrity (Nov 18, 2008)

Well the problem with saving back is everyone but this lady is using 2007 and they do use some formulas. I'm not sure if they use any formulas that don't convert to the 2003 form but they don't want to save back to 2003 just for this lady and they don't want to get her a new computer because she is just a part time person. Is there any way to have her open the files from her computer so that they aren't in read-only? I know it's not a permissions problem. It has to be a problem with the "FileFormatConverter.exe" that I installed from Microsoft's website. It is supposed to convert the file when she opens it and make it compatible automatically except it only opens the files in read-only.


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## Chevy (Jul 25, 2003)

Bite the bullet and have the company order Office 2007 (same flavor as the rest).

When compared to the amount of time you can expect to spend dealing with this one issue alone over the next year, it's worth it.


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