Microsoft Office and keeping backwards compatibility in mind
I’ve been a user of Microsoft Office for a number of years at this point and one thing I’ve pondered about when creating documents is this — what about backwards compatibility? Let’s explore a bit about this!
If you have an Office 365/Microsoft 365 subscription, you likely get monthly updates to your software that brings new features and performance enhancements. If you have the perpetual version, you probably don’t. There is a significant gap between the two product versions in that while one will get frequent new features, the other one won’t. This presents an issue when creating spreadsheets or documents or presentations in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint respectively. How do we maintain document functionality with the older versions of said programs? Will they still work? Perhaps more importantly, how do I rectify this?
Fortunately, newer versions of Microsoft 365 have a nifty feature that allows you to check your documents for backwards compatibility with earlier versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. To access this feature click File > Info. From there you’ll see a button called Check for Issues. Click on it. Microsoft will scan your document to assess what features you’ve used are supported in earlier versions and which ones are not. When it’s finished, it will bring up a dialog box that will give you a summary of the compatibility check you ran on your document. Sweet, right?
This is great, but now what?
It will take personal judgement call and different strategies to approach backwards compatibility. Personally, after creating spreadsheets and Word documents, I prefer to use the compatibility checker to see what won’t work in older versions before I would send finished documents out to the real world. Additionally, I have experience with which features are in different versions of each program so I apply this as well. Let me demonstrate with a brief tutorial.
Tutorial
In Word, Excel, or PowerPoint:
File > New
Create any new template. (In Word, I selected the Snapshot Calendar template)
Click Enable Content when presented with the yellow security warning bar at the top.
Click File > Info > Check for Issues > Check Compatibility.
You will be presented with a dialog box similar to this:
If you click the Select versions to show dropdown, you will see three buttons to toggle to show which versions of Word the summary is defining as not supporting the content in question. This way, you can single out the issues by version (Word 97–2003, Word 2007, or Word 2010). The dialog box provides more information about the occurrences with a Help hyperlink and the lowercase I within a circle icon. At this point it is unlikely but still possible to have users still working with Office 2010 or earlier, but Microsoft has already ended support for these versions and no longer provides a download for them either. In our case, the dialog box indicates to us that this template is not compatible with Word 2010 and earlier. This is likely because of the newer features and functionality introduced to Word in more recent versions that was not available in Word 2010 and earlier.
Now that you have an idea of how the compatibility checker can be used and incorporated into your use of Microsoft Office and even certain business processes, I highly encourage you to take advantage of this neat feature so any document you create will give you less issues to deal with as you’re editing and fine-tuning your work.
I’m Scot Nicklas and I also happen to be an industry-certified Microsoft Office Specialist Master in Microsoft Office 2013. I am excited to be starting this series of articles about certain aspects of Microsoft Office! Stay tuned for more updates!
