While it's surprising that Microsoft Office Compatibility pack is as big as it is, it's not loaded down with unnecessary extras, and it solves compatibility issues with older versions with little effort on your part. It also adds support to the Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 to open DOCX, XSLX, and PPTX files. Once you install this pack, you don't have to do much to make it work. That means you should set aside some time to download it if you're on a slow connection. It's a surprisingly big download - checking in at 37MB. If you're still using Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, then this patch will help you easily open, edit, and save files created with newer versions of Office. However, before you install this pack, make sure to download and install all of the latest updates from Microsoft. If you're using an unpatched version of Office, this download will fix it. You’ll be able to open, edit, save, and create the newer x formats.Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack makes files created with Office 2007 and later work seamlessly on earlier versions of Office. If you’re using Office 2003 (or even Office 2002 or 2000), download and install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats. Hence, it becomes very confusing or awkward for a user to open the word file. doc, while newer Word documents like Word 2007, Word 2010, Word 2013, Word 2016 save them as. Old Word application like Word 1997, 2000, 2003 saves its files as. docx format, so you can’t expect them to read it without a little help. A new file format to store the Word document files is also released with XML variant i.e. Previous versions of Word were written without knowledge of the. In the Save As dialog box, click the Save as pull-down menu and select Word 97-2003 Documents (*.doc). doc file, so that people using older versions can read it. Everything I say here also works for Excel and PowerPoint.) Just double-click the file and it will open. (I’m discussing Word specifically for convenience sake. (If anyone thinks I’m a shill for Microsoft, I suggest they read Why you shouldn’t upgrade to Windows 8.) But Microsoft did an excellent job making the transition as easy as possible, and ensuring that both the old and the new formats would remain readable.

Word 2016 upgrade old doc files