Office 2007 Compatibility

Some of our students are arriving on campus with Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, and Office 2007 installed. Our campus is not going to upgrade our faculty/staff/classroom computers to these until next summer. Until that time, we will have some overlap when our computers use the older version of Office and some students will have the newer version.

The problem is that files created by Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. in 2007 can NOT be opened by those programs in Office 2000 or 2003.

Please take the following two steps to address this problem with your students:

1. Install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack on your computer. This is an update for Microsoft Office 2000 and 2003 that allows those programs to open Office 2007 files. On Microsoft's website you can find instructions to install this update and the file you need. I highly recommend you do this for any computers you may use to access student work. If you are not comfortable doing this with a WCU computer, feel free to contact Colby or me. NOTE: This fix only works for Windows users - there is no fix for Mac users of Office.

2. Ask your students using Office 2007 to save their work as an Office 2003 file. To ease the transition, students using Office 2007 can save files in the Office 2003 format and submit these electronically. Feel free to send students using Office 2007 to this page that describes how to set their copy of Word to save to Office 2003 format by default. This will also work in Excel and PowerPoint.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions.