Is Word97 compatibile with Office Word 11?

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Hope4177 - 06 Oct 2005 23:38 GMT

I have Mircosoft Office Wrod version 11 on my computer running Windows XP and
I have to send documents to someone using Word97. Do I need to do anything
for this to work or will this work?

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Doug Robbins - 07 Oct 2005 04:57 GMT

While the file structure is the same, there are some enhancements in Word 11
(2003) that are not available in Word 97. It would therefore be best to set
the Compatability to Word97 under Tools>Options>Compatibility.

I think that the most signficant enhancement is the ability to wrap text
around tables. If you don't use that feature in Word 2003, I would not
expect there to be much of a problem.

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Hope this helps.

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Doug Robbins - Word MVP

>I have Mircosoft Office Wrod version 11 on my computer running Windows XP
>and
> I have to send documents to someone using Word97. Do I need to do
> anything
> for this to work or will this work?

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Charles Kenyon - 10 Oct 2005 18:58 GMT

Set your save options to only use features compatible with Word 97. In
addition to table wrapping, nested tables will cause problems.

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Charles Kenyon

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>I have Mircosoft Office Wrod version 11 on my computer running Windows XP
>and
> I have to send documents to someone using Word97. Do I need to do
> anything
> for this to work or will this work?

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Jay - 11 Oct 2005 16:58 GMT

I've found that even if you turn on the compatibility option in Word
2003, it doesn't stop you or warn you about using new features at the
time that you actually apply them to the document (eg text colours
that are not supported in Word 97), but gives you a warning when you
save the document. The document is still saved with the new features,
so is incompatible with Word 97. You get the same warning every time
you save the document. Also, apart from the warning, Word 2003 seems
to give very few clues about where in the document the
incompatibilities are - very infuriating. So the compatibility option
seems to be of limited use.

> Set your save options to only use features compatible with Word 97. In
> addition to table wrapping, nested tables will cause problems.

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Graham Mayor - 12 Oct 2005 09:03 GMT

This is not strictly true - if you disable features introduced after 97 and
use the example you quote, then the document is *not* saved with the
unsupported font colours, but is saved with the closest compatible colour -
this is clearly indicated in the warning box.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org
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> I've found that even if you turn on the compatibility option in Word
> 2003, it doesn't stop you or warn you about using new features at the
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
>> Set your save options to only use features compatible with Word 97.
>> In addition to table wrapping, nested tables will cause problems.

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Jay - 12 Oct 2005 14:23 GMT

Hi Graham,

I don't have Word 2003 on my PC at the moment so I can't repeat what
happened. At the time, I had a text box filled with black, with
non-black text in it. This was written and saved in Word 2003 with the
Windows 97 compatiblity option set, and the text appeared fine in Word
2003, but when I emailed it to someone with Word 97, they couldn't see
the writing in the text box. Also, every time I made a modification to
the document (before I realised there was a font incompatibility
problem) and saved the document, I would get this warning from
Word2003, which didn't locate the source. I would have thought that if
Word2003 had used the closest colour, this would be true when looking
at it with Word 2003, so I would have seen the problem in both
versions of Word.

Thanks for taking the trouble to reproduce the problem.

Best wishes,

Jay

> This is not strictly true - if you disable features introduced after 97 and
> use the example you quote, then the document is *not* saved with the
> unsupported font colours, but is saved with the closest compatible colour -
> this is clearly indicated in the warning box.

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Graham Mayor - 13 Oct 2005 07:22 GMT

Hmmm. I don't have Word 97 here, but I have tested with Word 2003, using a
black filled text box and a non-compatible yellow text and although the
yellow text was asjusted to a compatible colour it was still readable after
the conversion. I suppose there may be some unfortunate colour combinations
that would be unreadable, but this wasn't one ;)

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>

> Hi Graham,
>
[quoted text clipped - 21 lines]
>> with the unsupported font colours, but is saved with the closest
>> compatible colour - this is clearly indicated in the warning box.

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