MAC Excel 08 to PC Excel 2003

[Laurabell]

Hello. I recently purchased my first MAC with Excel for Mac 2008. I am unable to open any files created in it on my PC which has Excel 2003. Apple is of no help. They had assured me of compatibility at purchase citing the new open format. Any suggestions appreciated. The MAC Excel 08 file won't open on the MAC on which is was created with their Numbers program either.
Thanks

 

[someguy]

On the PC, try installing the Compatibility Pack for Office 2003.

Go here and click on the 'Download' button.

 

[velocityg4]

Personally I would open Excel, Powerpoint and Word. Then in each of their preferences change the default save as types from xlsx, pptx and docx to xls, ppt and doc respectively. I do that on any customers computer I install Office 2007, Office 2008 and OpenOffice onto. That way the files created are compatible with anyone running Office XP and later.

They work with earlier versions of office but some options you can choose may not work with Office 2000 and earlier. General formatting and likely 99% of what the average user would do will work to really early versions of office. As I can not think of anything I type in Word or formulas in Excel that I could not do on my 68K Mac running System 7.

 

[someguy]

I suppose it comes down to what works best for your situation. At work, the staff members that I support receive documents and spreadsheets from dozens of new people each day, and so it makes much more sense for me to configure their systems to read the newer file formats. However, it may suffice better in your situation to use the method described by velocityg4.

EDIT: Additionally, if it makes a difference, documents created in the updated format tend to be smaller in terms of file size. Much better to use if you are going to be emailing them to someone who has a either the compatibility pack or a recent version of Office installed.

 

[Laurabell]

Trying the compatibility pack first as like Someguy I have multiple users sending files . . . may be the best solution. Back when I know what works.