Word 2003 incompatibility

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?

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.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

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




quest765 wrote:
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?